


Taking a Chance

by Teaandcakes



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Bond does a lot of soulsearching, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Moneypenny knows what's up, Slow Burn, Younger Q, here be smut, starts sad but won't end sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-04-27
Packaged: 2018-05-21 01:42:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 28
Words: 41,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6033453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teaandcakes/pseuds/Teaandcakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Q has a hopeless start in life. Nothing is on his side, until James is.</p><p>This fic ignores Madeleine (sorry but there was zero chemistry IMO so she doesn't exist). It's post Vesper and female M assassination, and Gareth Mallory has recently replaced her. Q branch is still run by Boothroyd.</p><p>THIS FIC IS NOW COMPLETE.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Beginnings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JayEz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayEz/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [JayEz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayEz/pseuds/JayEz) in the [00QPrompts](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/00QPrompts) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Q grows up on the wrong side of the tracks, learns to hack and steal and fight to survive. Upon his eighteenth birthday, he has to leave the orphanage but slides into homelessness.  
> James finds him sleeping around the corner of his flat one night, and takes the young man in. 
> 
> (Either very slow build or gen; bonus points for rentboy!Q)

By nature, he was not a thief. Or a hacker. Or someone who ran away. And definitely not someone who did...those... other things that he did. 

By nature, Q was, or would be if he were allowed to be, a quiet boy, an animal lover, who spoke low and softly to humans and creatures alike. A private person.

It was just a shame that his cards had fallen onto such stony ground. 

.........

He was two when his father left, one moment watching TV while swearing and drinking; the next, just a permanent depression on the worn vinyl sofa where his backside had been. From the playpen that made up his whole world, being cheaper than a childminder, Q solemnly regarded his father's exit with an impassive face and no tears. He didn't know his dad wouldn't be back, but he felt the house breathe out with relief each time the man left, and this time was no different. It sighed, the fear leaving it. 

It was only later, when he was six and was told that his father was dead, that he dared to both grieve and to exhale fully with relief. 

...............

His mother lived what would be labelled a "chaotic" existence. A previous child had been given up for adoption under duress from Social Services, due to run-ins with the police and her mental health crises and drug use and there was close attention being paid, in theory, as to the welfare of her young son. 

But they were understaffed, and she was sly, as only the fearful mother can truly be.

..........

Home. Home? Could you call it that, really? Well, such as it was, home was a one-bedroom council flat, on a bleak and windswept estate in North London. In theory it wasn't fit for human habitation: the windows were black with mould and it was mostly freezing. Q had constant colds and chest infections, turning eventually into fairly serious asthma. His mother and he both slept in the living room, because there was no central heating in the place and the gas fire in that room was just enough to keep the worst of the chill off. Of course, a lot of the time, there wasn't sufficient credit on the prepay meter for the gas to be on, which made the gas fire rather academic. Then, he slept in the bedroom, in all his clothes, and still froze.

He shared the bedroom with his mother's "stock". She was on state benefits, of course, though she often got docked money for not attending job training or interviews. A chaotic life does not equate with turning up to a 9am interview, dressed smartly and being sober. She made up the shortfall with cash in hand work. Mostly, it was selling counterfeit cigarettes and booze. When supplies or customers for that were scarce, though, she sold herself. That last part she managed to keep from the officials, until it was too late for her. She tried not to bring clients back to the flat. Sometimes, she had to. 

From an early age, Q hated their existence in the flat. It was never quiet, the flat had little sound insulation and he couldn't think. The neighbours were always shouting, and the sound hurt his head. He started school, but the stigma of his cheap ugly glasses and vouchers for free school meals added to his very slight frame, singled him out for a hefty dose of bullying from the start. The knowledge that he couldn't afford to replace the clothes that got ripped, just made it worse. 

............

She always told Q that one day they would find a nice little house, with a garden, and they would move there together. He would have a bicycle, a new one, and there wouldn't be any more men coming around the flat. 

But it never happened. Q was only seven when she died. 

She wasn't ill, and there wasn't an accident. She fell prey to a client. They wouldn't tell him exactly what happened, only that she wasn't going to come back and he was going to have to be taken into emergency foster care. He thought they meant at some point, but it turned out that it meant, like, now. He had to pack, each garment and small memento freezing his heart. They asked him if he wanted to take anything of hers. He couldn't tell them that she didn't really have anything that wasn't rented or a gift from her clients, and so he just shook his head, and shuffled out of the flat, one look back and then out into the night.

.........

The foster placement was short-term, with a family who were already full and Q stayed there less than a week. It was also too far away from school, so he didn't go that week. He thought there would be a funeral for his mum, but the police said that they had to do a lot of tests on her, so that would have to wait. He wondered if she was in a freezer or if they had made her into a mummy, like in one of his library books. There was a picture of Nefertiti in the book. He hoped his mum would be beautiful too, and that she was a proper swaddled up mummy. Sometimes mummies opened up their tombs and came to life. 

After four days of eating only biscuits and drinking only lemonade, the social services lady with the wooden owl brooch and dangly earrings came to tell him that he was going to Flint Court. He nodded, because he had no idea what that was. She tried to take his hand but he flinched. She smiled at him still, despite that, though she looked unhappy about something, not about the hand, something else. 

.........

The place was much bigger than he imagined, and he found it hard to tuck himself away small enough so that no one noticed him. School was his only sanctuary, because as soon as he got back to the Court, the clanging and echoing voices around the corridor made it impossible to think straight.

He lay awake at night, in his small room, with its mismatched fraying curtains and cartoon duvet, and thought about his mother, and hoped that she was able to hear him when he whispered to her about his worries and fears. She had faded from sharp view in his mind, and become a talisman in his head that he turned to for comfort.

She never answered him back.


	2. Growing up alone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q's schooldays, and years at the children's home.

He was at the home for more than fourteen years. Days followed a familiar routine. Up at seven, shower, breakfast then off to school. At first Q had meekly followed the rest. But as the rest of his age cohort grew upwards and outwards and headed towards puberty, Q stayed small and so slender that he looked as if he might snap. He hated it, and longed to be more obviously masculine. He started to shave, his dark hair luxuriant and making for obvious beard shadow, and everything developed in the right areas, but his features were more striking than handsome and he displayed far too much grace for the liking of his football-obsessed fellow residents. 

The food at the home wasn't bad, but Q usually felt too nervous to eat, unsure of what might be stuffed down his neck from behind, or when someone would come up and flick him in the face. He hated people touching his face. When his father used to smack him across his cheek, he would touch it afterwards, as if assessing if he'd done a thorough enough job. It was a good job he had naturally strong even teeth, because he was only persuaded to the dentist's surgery twice during his tenure. 

Touch was actually a general problem area for him. Child protection rules were being tightened because of abuse scandals, and so the only touching staff did was in the form of restraint of a violent resident. His mother had seemed not to be aware that physical closeness was important, she thought the playpen was enough, that seeing her was enough. After all, he wasn't crying. It never occurred to her that after a while, babies learn not to cry if their crying is never heeded. 

So Q wrapped himself in many layers of thin clothes, Tshirts and cardigans, and worried knots into the cuffs and holes into the hems. He liked Spring colours, pale blues and yellows. Once, they all went on a trip to some country house, paid for by a charity from funds seized from the ill-gotten assets of drug dealers. There was green for as far as he could see, and yellow flowers, so many of then, in great banks swathing the undulating parkland. Their carer said they were daffodils, and Q picked one, hiding it under his layers of clothes. It was wilted and faded before they got off the coach, but he put it in a mug and gave it water. 

...............

It was when Q was fourteen than things began to disintegrate in the carefully constructed carapace he had established for himself. On the surface, things were going well in some areas: he'd found that he had a weird and unexpected talent for maths and science, and was now the go - to man for any gadgets that got broken (which was common) in the house. He loved Maths, loved the playfulness of the numbers and the dependability of there being a right and a wrong answer, to some extent at least. He could play with different ways of achieving an answer and make the numbers dance for him, conducting his whole little orchestra, safe and certain.

There wasn't much access to a lot of computers at the Court, so he tended to use the school ones. One of his teachers, Mr Isherwood, noticed his interest and applied for a grant from a locally based charitable trust, and Q, in this way, acquired his very first computer. Coding was even better than Maths. Maths was enjoyable and dependable, but writing your own code was being like God. You didn't just explain the world, you created new ones all of your own. 

So in that respect he was happy. 

............

Difference, though, that thing the rational adult learns (hopefully) to cherish, is simply not tolerated in the world of the deprived youngster. There has to be someone to focus on, to target as being worse than you, to distract from the deprivations of your own situation. 

Q, slinking around in a world of his own, his hair messy and tucked behind his ears, thick glasses and thin chested, was always destined to be a target. Regularly beaten up, he concentrated on protecting his face, conscious that it would be a lot harder to do his computer work if he couldn't see the screen. At night, he removed his glasses and dark green eyes blinked back, hollow cheekbones prominent, his delicate straight jaw line pale above a long neck. His hair flopped freely and dark stubble shadowed his jaw. He could see that there was a certain aesthetic quality, but that seemed bizarre to him, and not desirable. 

By day, he tried to avoid attention, but had to learn to use his fists just to come away battered but still conscious. 

..........

At eighteen, all the residents of the Court had to leave, and were given help by the local council to get a bedsit, unfortunately often only available in premises filled with those whose lives were just as chaotic as his own mother's had been.(Or just as full of drink and violence as his father's).

Q spent his first two weeks in the flat enjoying the sensation of freedom from the rules and curfews of the children's home. He was earning a bit of money fixing people's computers and attending college. But it wasn't enough. He was way ahead of the college course and he needed kit. Too old to get any more grants or help from the council or the charity that had bought him the computer before, he was trying to find a way to make some cash but still have time to do his coding work, which was now taking up most of his time.

Sometimes his benefits didn't arrive on time, or he spent too much money on upgrading the memory on his computer, and then he found himself looking for waste food in supermarket rubbish compounds, dodging security. But they tightened up their processes, worried about being sued if someone got food poisoning, and started spraying the food with disinfectant. After that, more than a few times, he actually stole food. He didn't want to, but hunger got the better of him. He was caught once, and cautioned. The feeling of the soft scratch of the paper suit they gave him to wear in the police cell irritated his pale, soft skin, and he couldn't forget the way it lay against his skin. They took the food away, the things he'd stolen. Sausage rolls and an orange. That was it. A criminal record for sausage rolls and an orange. He concluded that his chances of a good job in computing had now vanished, along with the food. 

In the end, a kind custody sergeant kicked him out later that night with a pasty and a can of Coke. 

'Don't tell anyone, I'm meant to be the tough guy. You just look as if you needed that food, not like most of them that nicks stuff.'

Q thanked him. Before he'd reached the end of the road, both the pasty and the Coke were finished. He could have eaten four.

.........

He needed a break.

He saw the card in the window of the twenty four hour newsagent cum Asian greengrocers on Stanley Road, in amongst the ads for baby equipment and builders.

"Do you have what it takes to be a model? Free portfolio photos, no obligation. Experienced photographer. If you fit the bill, we act as agents too, getting you work. 

"Currently looking for young males, slim physique, good looking regular features for catalogue and other work. "

There was a phone number. No name. No address. 

Q wrote it down. No harm. He could go along, just to see. He was certainly the equivalent of a male size zero. Maybe not tall enough? Still, there was no obligation, and the guy sounded professional. He hummed as he made his way back to the bedsit. Maybe things were looking up?


	3. Two different worlds, set on a collision course

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enter Bond, James Bond. He's bored and horny, but when is he not?
> 
> Q sees a rosy future as a model.

While Q was contemplating a future of glittering catwalks and bottomless champagne that awaited him, hoping it would arrive soon because he was bloody hungry and his girocheques hadn't arrived so he couldn't get any benefit money, a total stranger named Bond was lying on a far too comfortable sun lounger in Acapulco, wondering whether it would be either good form or good for his chances of leaving here alive if he responded positively to the extremely lewd words being whispered in his ear by an well-oiled Amazonian. 

His adversary in his mission, a short ruthless man, was glowering from his stool seat at the beach bar. Smiling, but in a wolfish way. In his younger days, James would have risked it, but he was older and wiser now, so James decided that since Pamela had no secrets to divulge in pillow talk, his right hand would be a safer route to sexual release for now. Consequently, he demurely kissed her hand, and played the romantic but chaste admirer instead of the demanding lover. 

He left Mexico that night with the diamonds, three less bullets in the Walther, a short male corpse slumped over a jug of tequila at the beach bar in the moonlight. Pamela who now had a whopper of a diamond stuffed somewhere appropriately discreet, had kissed him goodbye and headed north. Bond thought of the diamond as he steered the small plane down towards the rendezvous point with his contacts. He'd liked Pamela, she was a sport, and the insurance company would be happy with getting almost all of the jewels back. She deserved some small compensation for that man's cruelty.

..........

Back in London two days later, Bond stalked into SIS with his usual air of a prowling tiger. He was surprisingly unscathed by this latest operation, but it was hardly his greatest challenge. Almost dull, in fact. 

Moneypenny was impressed. 

"Really, James! You gave us the impression that wanton destruction of kit and near-death encounters were compulsory in your operations. Were you very bored, darling?"

Bond gave a wry smile, just a very short one.

"It was ghastly. Try and get me something better next time. Is he in?"

He indicated the large armoured door behind Moneypenny. 

"He is. But you'll need to see the medics and Q branch first, to divest your kit. Be back in two hours, and you can have fifteen minutes."

Bond raised an eyebrow. The new M was clearly using time management as a form of peacocking. When....she was here, he'd just have walked in, knocking as he did so. Obviously, Gareth Mallory meant to change that, and the theatrics would only raise Bond's hackles. 

He said nothing more, but strode off to annoy the medics, and then to announce to a stunned Q branch that he was down only three bullets on the trip, and they were all inside the target.

...........

Across the river, in a back street in Camden, Q was nervously pushing back his dark unruly hair and trying to rearrange his clothes so that they looked less unfashionable and worn, without, it had to be said, much success. He peered at the small wired glass inset in the door. Not much use as a mirror. 

He'd thought the photographic studios would be bigger, like a shop, with glossy photos in the window? The guy had sounded ok on the phone, encouraging almost. He'd asked Q all about himself, about his background, his family, all of that. Q told him that he was an orphan brought up in care, and Pete really sounded as if he cared, that he wanted to help Q. It was a nice feeling, one that he wasn't really used to.

Q was still really short of money. He'd started a bit of hacking, just for fun really, but that didn't bring in any cash. He got into all sorts of places like banks and government sites, but even though he could have stolen millions, he didn't want to risk getting into more trouble, so just left Easter eggs of fun code. The Governor of the Bank of England might want to play "Oh Mummy" which he'd ripped from an Amstrad 9512 he found in a skip, after all. 

There was just a doorbell, though, and the other numbers in the divided building seemed to be just money exchanges and language schools. 

He pressed the doorbell, and heard Pete's voice. There was music playing in the background, with a heavy beat. The door buzzed open, and he found himself at the bottom of a flight of stairs. It was musty and dark, and smelt a bit of sour sweat. It was probably better upstairs, he concluded, and took them two at a time. 

............

"Bond. Welcome back. Excellent results in Mexico. And surprisingly cost-effective for once, too."

Bind smiled insincerely. M reciprocated in kind.

"My pleasure. Is there anything pressing on the horizon?" 

"A few trifles, but you're due a week or ten days of physical refresher training so I thought we might slot that in. If that's convenient for you, of course?"

Bond knew M was right, but also wanted to see the results from the tests taken at the end of these annual intensive training periods. Failure would mean losing his 00 badge, and at his age, there was a good probability of not winning it back. Bastard. 

He smiled. 

"No problem."

They chatted about niceties for a while longer, and then made their excuses. All the warmth and loyalty was missing, what he'd had with Her, and he didn't know if he and Mallory would ever really hit it off. 

He decided to book in his first sessions for the next day, and to take some downtime. It was sunny, and summer, and for the first time since Vesper died, he actually felt positive about the world. He headed off to the bar terrace for a coffee. The waiter was a young man, his uniform a little too fitted, and Bond was reminded that whilst he came from the generation for whom a whiff of anything other than heterosexuality was poison for a career in SIS, his body spoke of something different. 

In truth, he wasn't looking forward to going back to the flat. Its sharp lines and minimal decor were stylish, but lonely and cold sometimes. James had always craved company and craved sex in equal measure. Most people found it easier to acquire the first than the second, but for James, it was the opposite. He had no difficulty in finding people who wanted him to fuck them, but his lifestyle and personality made for a toxic mix when it came to cohabitation. He'd never liked the idea much, either. Even with Vesper it had niggled away slightly at him, a doubt about whether it would work. His life had been so military, so regimented: it was all he understood, and he understood it in a singularly male way. 

He thanked the waiter, and watched as he walked away. James hadn't fucked a guy for twenty years. He wasn't planning to start now. He played with his lighter and set light to the paper coaster that came with his coffee. 

Enough. He shook his head, slugged down the coffee, and headed for the subterranean car park. The Aston was there, gleaming softly, and he lowered himself into the soft hide seats. Roaring out of the entrance up the ramp, he decided to head into town before facing the empty flat. Over the bridge, then turning right, then up towards Bloomsbury. He picked up speed. The traffic lights were kind. He accelerated.


	4. Two worlds collide

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q has an encounter with Pete the fashion photographer. Then he bumps into James Bond...in a manner of speaking.

Q felt comfortable at first. 

There was a decent array of photographic and video equipment scattered around the room, several chaises and a bed, along with the more domestic clutter of sinks and worktables. 

He stood, shifting from foot to foot as Pete walked around him scratching his ear and taking quick digital shots. He asked then for Q to strip down to his underwear, and whilst Q wasn't exactly comfortable with it, he knew that the guy needed to see his shape properly. He twisted his hands together in front of his groin. He knew he wasn't anything impressive down there, and hated exposing his pigeon chest to a stranger. He was beginning to wonder what he was doing here, if he was completely honest. 

Pete told him to sit down then, still in his navy jersey pants, and there was only the chaise, the one with the long coffee table in front of it, so he perched there. Pete brought them coffee, and several large folders of photo shoots he said he'd done, and Q started flicking through the pages. They all looked quite old, like they'd been taken in the eighties. The room started to feel too warm. Pete sat down next to him. Quite close. Pete was sitting quite close. Too close.

But he needed this job. Q shifted a bit on the seat. His voice squeaked a bit when he spoke. 

"So, what do you think? Will I be able to get work?"

Pete looked at him appraisingly. Pete was kind of good looking but in a gone to seed way. His pallor wasn't healthy, Q didn't think, and Q didn't really want to look at him any more. Pete carried on looking at him too long. There was something cold in his eyes.

"There's always work, Q, for those lads prepared to work hard. Now you, you're no use to me for catwalk and high fashion. Too short, by a stretch. You need to be minimum six foot, and you're barely five nine, are you?. 

He laughed. 

"Catalogues might use you, for teen fashion, though kids now want to look more ripped. I'd say your market is in more live stuff. Video, meet and greet, that kind of thing."

Q was confused. His head was aching and he nearly dropped the coffee cup. He managed to get it to the table but he could feel it spinning. 

"I don't understand what that means."

"Nothing difficult. Nothing complicated. You provide attractive company for social functions. Just be friendly, real friendly. You get paid, I get a commission, everyone's happy. If you're good at that, maybe some film work, just low budget stuff.

For that there might be the need to be a lot more friendly."

Pete's arm was around him now, and Q tried to move away. But his head was suddenly heavy, like lead, and his limbs were starting to become numb. He only dimly felt a pinch as Pete's fingernail snagged on his skin moving down to Q's underpants, and the cool air hitting his skin as they were drawn down was the only thing that still gave him any alertness.

...........

Being brought up an orphan made him vulnerable. But it also made him self reliant. Somewhere deep at the back of his failing mind was the conviction, that if he did not at least try now, it would be too late. Maybe no one would ever see him again. That he was in deep, deep shit.

With what remained of his failing consciousness, he lurched from the sofa, kicking Pete full and square in the face, and flung himself at the door. His underwear ripped in Pete's grasp but he didn't care, was only half aware. He managed to get out and stumble down the steep stairs and launched himself at the street door, running totally stark naked headlong out into the street, out into the traffic, and straight out in front of a speeding Aston Martin. 

..............

Bond had killed a lot of people. He'd heard the sound they made as their bones snapped, as they drowned as their lungs filled with fluid, as their brain exploded from the impact of a sniper round. 

But he'd never actually to date killed anyone by just running them over. And definitely not someone in the nude. 

He barely saw anything happen. He was just driving, then there was a split second where his brain registered the thought "is that a pale shape?", and while it was still registering the question, he felt the impact.

The boy's skinny naked body hit the car a glancing blow on the front right corner and literally flew up into the air. A moment later, he landed, yards away, all crumpled and bent the wrong ways. His body landed before his head, but his head did hit the Tarmac pretty hard all the same. Bond shouted "Fuck no" at the same moment as he hit the brakes.

James stopped the car the second of impact and leapt out. He yelled at the passers-by to call an ambulance and the police. He rang Tanner, who could break it to M and also deal with the Met officers, so that Bond's name wouldn't be published in what was bound to be a reported event.

He knew there was no way he could have avoided the lad, none at all, even if he'd been going slower and the CCTV would confirm it, the lad never even looked, but he was speeding and so he would probably be prosecuted. That didn't bother Bond, though. He was more concerned about the lad's injuries, but more even than that, about why a teenager would be running out of a dodgy looking down at heel premises in broad daylight with no clothes on?

He sighed. The Aston was badly damaged on the front and front wing. So much for his earning good favour from the mission.

People were already taking pictures, and a crowd was beginning to gather. Those who had seen what had happened were trying to stop those who hadn't from trying to thump James. He was more concerned with the victim. He'd got him cradled in his lap, his jacket under the boy's head, his running T-shirt covering his modesty. He couldn't tell about the head injury, just that there was a large lump and abrasions to the left hand side of his head, but he'd definitely broken a leg, it was an open fracture and the bone was grotesquely visible. He looked peaceful, unconscious. Bond glanced up and saw a man peering from the doorway the boy had emerged from at such speed. He memorised the face, and the nosebleed. Then he looked away again, before the man noticed him looking.

...............

He was almost grateful when the police arrived, along with a small contingent of badly dressed down security services officers. He gave a short statement, along with the several witnesses who had actually seen what happened, and was then told after consultation between the police and SIS that he could leave for now. 

He didn't want to leave without knowing that the boy would be alright, so he asked where they were taking him. Apparently the Chelsea and Westminster was nearest.

He was on a stretcher now, looking smaller and frailer against the bright cheerfulness of the red blanket. He was quite beautiful, too, full lips, long dark eyelashes and ridiculously lustrous and thick dark hair, framing perfect cheekbones. His neck was long and swan-like. Only his slightly prominent ears and too thin frame detracted from a vision of regular perfection, but James thought maybe beauty needed some contrast, to accentuate the qualities that shone. The young man's eyes were closed, the lashes resting on his pale white cheek. 

His body was almost ridiculously thin. Thin enough that someone might tut and express an opinion. James thought it was probably genetic, partly, but that the boy hadn't enough to eat as well. Tutting didn't feed anyone. The boy needed a good meal. 

James realised he had seatbelt burns which were now beginning to smart. He turned away and got into one of the SIS cars so they could take him home. As he left the scene, wondered if beauty was what had led this boy into danger. He'd seen that too many times before.

He saw the man from the doorway slip away down the street.


	5. They meet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bond finds out a bit more about Q's sorry existence, but also his IT interests. He pays a visit to the hospital. And finally meets Q....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok so I think there will be another chapter tomorrow but prob only one at best over the weekend because of family life. 
> 
> This is def a slow burn, chapter 5 and they've only just met!
> 
> Thankyou to everyone leaving such lovely comments and kudos and subscribing, I'm having a blast writing this!

The Aston had been towed. Bond had been dropped off at his flat, and, three hours later, he was nursing an obscenely generous Scotch in a Waterford crystal glass, more a fist than a finger in measure. 'The Lark Ascending' swelled into thin reedy crescendos from the speakers recessed into the walls around the room. He lay on the steel framed leather sofa, eyes closed, brow creased. 

No matter how long he kept his eyes shut, all he could see was the pale, still face of a slight, dark haired young man. 

Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. It must be the shock of the accident. After all, James always tried to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties and hated the phrase collateral damage. At the end of the day, he had been solely responsible for this logically avoidable event, morally and probably legally. And he was worried. About the boy's leg. He didn't look like an athlete, far from it, a gust of wind would blow him away, but that didn't mean that any permanent damage to the nerves wouldn't be a tragedy for him, and his head injury was a whole different game. Bond guessed that the lad didn't have much going for him, not hanging around that neighbourhood and in that company. He felt responsible: he never felt responsible, never, but he did now. Shit.

There was something else, too. Lying there, helpless and still, the boy had looked like a beautiful drowned spirit. Bond smiled for a moment as he remembered that neck, the slope of his lower back, his beautiful hair. 

Then the smile drained as he remembered where the boy was now. 

"Damn it. Bloody nuisance."

He realised he'd said it aloud, and finished his drink in a swig. Then, conscious he was already over the drink drive limit and keen not to attract any more official attention today if at all possible , he changed into a navy polo shirt and cashmere sweater, over dark grey jeans and soft leather trainers. He padded downstairs to ask the doorman to hail a cab.

...................

The room was small, its lighting dim. It was empty, its occupant in surgery. Bond placed the stupidly frothy flowers on the small wheeled table, and sat in the chair by the bed. After an hour, he put the flowers in the water jug, which was probably not going to be popular. 

No one else came during the four hours he sat there. No friends, no relatives, not a fucking soul. The chaps at work had tried to track them down, but it seemed as if there was absolutely no-one waiting for this boy, no-one caring whether he even lived or died. They'd found out his address though, and had checked it out. One of them told Bond on the mobile that he "was glad my kids don't live anywhere like that." He'd gone on to say there were dirty needles in the stairwells and rubbish everywhere, but that Q's bedsit room was as tidy as any teenager's could be, just a few dirty cups and crisp and pepperoni wrappers. There was no food in the cupboards, though, or in the fridge. No wonder he was thin if that was all he was living on.

The agent did say something interesting though. There was a lot of computer kit, some unusual stuff, even some stuff they might use at SIS, or GCHQ. He thought Bond might like to see it and sent over an embedded video link. Bond watched it, then whistled. No wonder the kid didn't eat. They knew his income was pitiful, and there'd been nothing at all for a month due to the cock-up at the DSS with his claim renewal. What cash he had was all going on paying instalments on this little lot. He hoped the kid wasn't doing anything too nefarious using the equipment. It was all seized, and would be analysed. Any incident involving an active agent could be a setup, a trap, so there was no question, Q was on their radar now, whether he liked it or not.

In the video he could also see a single bed with a thin, lumpy mattress, a tiny sink and a portable two ring burner. Oh, and a kettle and a toaster heavy with burnt crumbs. There was no proper cooker, and the bathroom must be shared with the junkies, it looked like. That can't have been nice.

The last thing he observed were how few personal possessions there were in the room. Very few clothes, a cat calendar, an alarm clock with a picture of Einstein on it, and a couple of beach pebbles and a model cat made of shells. That was literally it. 

Bond thought of his own consciously minimalist flat, and realised that minimalism was only stylish and welcome when it was a choice. And that, though an orphan himself, his lot had been much more fortunate than this boy's . 

"Q" seemed to be how he referred to himself in paperwork. James wondered if he had a name for which this was an abbreviation, or if it was a nickname. He must have a surname too, but they hadn't got that yet. 

He looked out of the window, down to the street below, at the people far below rushing around like ants, and closed his eyes.

............

Q hadn't been conscious most of the time before his surgery, but waking up in the hospital recovery room was a rude reminder that staying asleep for good wasn't an option. He wasn't in pain, at least, and it took him a few moments to register anything other than the ticking of the clock on the white-tiled wall. Hours and hours since he remembered being in that flat? He remembered running out of there, feeling so disorientated, and then he remembered an agonising slamming impact to his leg. He didn't remember hitting the ground, nor anything after that. 

He heard a rustle, and tried to turn his head towards the sound, but it hurt. A nurse smiled at him and told him to stay still. She looked relieved, he thought. Maybe they didn't think he would wake up, necessarily? 

"Hello, Q. You've had an operation on your leg. We took a look at your bump on your head, too, but we're happy with that for now, we'll just keep monitoring. Your leg was broken in a few places so we put some framing and pins in. You'll be with us for a bit. Is that ok, is there anything you need, or anything you want to ask me at the moment?"

Q digested this information, chewing his lip. He felt like crying but wasn't sure if that was because of his leg, delayed shock or just the effects of the drugs. He shook his head, deciding that he would put off thinking for later; for now, he was somewhere warm and dry and not being molested or doped by that photographer.

He closed his eyes again, and soon was aware of the clicking of wheels and slight lurching as his bed trolley was wheeled into a lift and up to the ward. 

............

Bond woke when the trolley was wheeled in. He smiled reassuringly at the nurse and the orderly. They didn't ask who he was; he clearly looked like someone you didn't challenge. They fussed around, making Q comfortable, and then told Bond he would probably be intermittently drowsy for a few hours yet. All Bond could see was a small tousled shaper, buried deep in the bedclothes. So small. 

It was quiet for a couple of minutes once they left. Bond, unwilling to disturb the apparently sleeping Q, occupied himself by reading the medical notes. He frowned as he read the full detail of the leg injury. He knew it was likely to cause some element of limitation - probably a limp. At least the head report was positive, and the scans looked clear, apart from the bruising which needed monitoring.

He nearly dropped the clipboard when a muffled voice came from the bed.

"I don't think I know you. Do I? I'm not exactly sure why you are here, and who you are."

It was said with a mild air of resigned regret, mixed with confusion.

Bond set aside the clipboard and moved closer to the bed. The eyes. He could see the boy's eyes now for the first time and they were incredible. Green and bewitching, lashes every bit as dark as he recalled. Strong brows, and a curving nose, and those lips. For a long moment he couldn't draw his gaze away. 

At last, Bond remembered himself, and smiled down at this bruised and grazed vision. 

"I'm afraid I am the reason you are here. I hit you with my car. I'm very sorry."

The boy shook his head, or tried to, but it caused pressure on the lump on the side of his head, and he winced, so he aborted the effort. 

"Not your fault. I was running away from...someone. I didn't look, I just ran."

Bond was surprised he was so forgiving. 

"I was speeding. I should have been driving slower. I might have seen you sooner, maybe not hit you." 

He thought that would make the boy reconsider the apportionment of blame. Instead, the lad made a moue of distaste, and replied,

"I was stark naked. I ran out into the road. What were you supposed to do?'

Bond nodded. 

"You were very naked. I'm sure you had your reasons, though it was a bit of a surprise."

Q looked down. 

"I'm in a bit of a mess, I think. Not only...this, but generally."

Bond was reminded of an Internet video of an otter trying to eat candy floss in the water, only to see it dissolved to nothing in seconds by the water. The boy looked as if it was just hitting him, his situation. Not sure if he was about to cry, and really wanting to avoid that, James acted impulsively. 

"You're not going back there, Q. Not to that bedsit, and definitely not to the likes of that man."

"You don't know me, you don't know anything about me. You can't just say that."

"I know enough."

James didn't know what he was going to do with this stray who looked a bit like a thin stray cat, but he hoped he wasn't going to end up scratched to pieces. For now, the lad was tame enough. Q nodded at him and didn't ask any more questions, his eyelids drooping. It seemed as though for now, James' words were enough reassurance and the heat of the hospital room did the rest. Q dropped off to sleep, tongue slightly visible between rows of white teeth, scarlet lips slightly parted. 

Now that he knew the boy was not in danger, Bond allowed himself to watch for a while without fear, the breathing of the drug-induced sleep rendering Q's features relaxed. He looked so young. 

"Too young. Way. Too. Young", Bond muttered, shaking his head and made his way out into the corridor.


	6. Eating custard tarts with a cat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bond visits Q in hospital. Then he goes to find Pete the happy snapper. There are custard tarts and lime green jelly.

Once Bond had in hand the piece of paper that told him that Q had definitely been drugged with a date rape drug, he was itching to get back to the photographic studio before low-life Pete dared to come back and clear it of anything incriminating. 

But first, he had a medical and his firearms tests to do. 

Thankfully, for once not physically fucked up by his mission, he managed to sail through both, which was, he had to admit, the first time for a while. This time, no one would need to fake any results, which was useful, because as Shakespeare put it, "the wench is dead". God, he missed the old M. She treated him like half skivvy and half naughty schoolboy and he bloody loved her. She seemed as if she'd go on for ever, even though he knew from this job that nothing, absolutely nothing, lasts that long.

Four hours later it was coming on to evening and he took a cab back to the studio. The door was locked, but laughably easy to circumvent, and he headed up the stairs. There was no one about. Clearly, Pete had decided that discretion was the better part of keeping his bollocks attached to his body. It wouldn't work, that plan, but for now it made it a bit easier to search the premises. 

It didn't take long to find what he was looking for. Lots of pen drives. He didn't bother going through more than one of two, but what he found made his blood run cold. There were a few glossy prints, too. He secured the worst of it in an attaché case, then searched for clues as to where Pete might be now. He found a home address, but didn't expect him to show up there; instead he was looking for where a man like Pete might hide out. As he looked, he idly smashed the camera equipment beyond repair, determined to ensure the means of the man's activities should be put behind use. Several possible leads later, he left the premises with its carpet of plastic, metal and glass shards, glad to be outside in the dusk gloom. Pete could wait until tomorrow. He had a patient to visit.

.............. 

Q was awake when he got there. He was off the drip and catheter but still confined to bed except for assisted trips to the loo. When Bond swept into the room, Q was poking around in a bowl containing what looked like the sort of dessert that had been mildly fashionable around the end of the 1970s, but which mysteriously clung on in NHS hospitals, perhaps purely on the basis of being easy to swallow. Q might have been half starved when he decided to head-butt an Aston Martin, but he clearly wasn't desperate enough to finish that lime green abomination. 

Bond indicated the sorry mess. 

"Cuisine not to your liking?"

Q looked so miserable as he shook his head, that James had to suppress a smile. He'd once looked after a neighbour's cat, a long time ago, before he joined Six, and ran out of the creature's regular food. He bought some from a corner shop and doled it out into a bowl. He couldn't see the difference, but the look that cat gave him, haughty disgust mixed with profound regret, was the exact mirror of the expression on the face of the young man lying in the hospital bed, sadly regarding his technicolour bowl. 

"That bad? Okay, then. Tomorrow, you will have proper food. Tonight, you'll have to make do with this."

James pulled from his pocket a rather crumpled paper bag with a small custard tart inside it and a plastic spoon. He'd nicked it from one of the security goons. Q looked hungrily on, his slender hand reaching out like a cat paw dabbing at a toy on a string. 

He is a bloody cat, Bond concluded. And resolved to see if treating Q like a cat made him happy or not. 

"Wait, you can't eat the pastry yet, only the custard. Let me spoon it out." 

So they sat there, this peculiar combination, Bond now sitting on the end of the bed, scooping out morsels of custard with the tiny spoon, and Q eating them from the spoon, being hand-fed, with his eyes closed and an expression of bliss on his face. It was a tiny reverie, and James was sorry when, all too soon, there was just a scraped clean pastry case remaining. He ate it, smiling at Q's moue of disgruntlement. 

"Maybe tomorrow. Your stomach needs a gradual return to solid food".

He thought he heard an audible huff. At least it wasn't a hiss.

..........

Once the custard was cleared up, Q told Bond that his leg might be ok, but that he'd be prone to arthritis when he was older, and might set off the metal detectors at airports. "That won't be a problem though."

Bond frowned, not liking the idea of the metalwork having to stay in Q's leg. 

"I don't fly. I've never flown, I've never had the money. And I'm completely terrified of the idea."

Bond looked incredulous until he saw the look on the boy's face. Oh, OK. Not a joke, then.

"You wouldn't like being me, then. Rather a lot of flying. And sometimes I even have to leave halfway through the flight, if things get a bit awkward, rude stewardess, dodgy food, backed up toilets, that kind of thing." 

Q peered at him. They'd given him his glasses back, well, given him glasses anyway, his old ones were in a hundred pieces swept off a Bloomsbury back street. The peering must be a habit, maybe from before he had the right glasses, or maybe before he had any glasses. Orphans didn't always have someone to readily notice that they were having problems with distant objects. 

"So...."

Bond had been waiting for this question. He tried to look casual. 

"...why are there two armed men outside my hospital room? And what is your actual name? And why won't anyone tell me whether my stuff is ok in my flat? The lock isn't brilliant and I've got some computer stuff I don't want nicked?"

Bond grimaced. 

"Let's take them in my chosen order, yes? My name is Bond, James Bond. Is that my real name? Possibly, possibly not. Unfortunately I'm not permitted to say. I work for a division of the Civil Service that is very discreet..."

He was interrupted.

"You're a spy?" 

"Intelligence agent in the field, I prefer to call it. Sounds more respectable. The armed men are there because of me, and because we need to be sure that your delightful Pete the pervert really was solely concerned with assaulting you, and not involved in some elaborate trap involving me."

Q looked fascinated now. Less so once James continued.

"Your computer equipment is consequently now the property of the U.K. Security services and is at this moment being probed within an inch of its life to determine exactly what you have been involved in. Given, you know, that you appear to have preferred that to actually eating."

James picked up the clipboard at the end of the bed. 

"Eight stone is just ridiculous, Q. What were you thinking?"

Q looked mutinous. 

"I was playing, getting into places, important systems and programmes, amusing myself. You lot can't just take my kit. It's mine. You owe me for it."

James sighed. 

"So your playing around, these systems. All legal activity, was it?"

Q scowled. James grinned. 

"Thought not. But fear not, young Q. If you're half as good at playing as you indicate, you might not need to replace the kit. The U.K. government might buy you some of your own, on the condition that you play nicely from now on."

"Will I have a choice? And will they, even when they know what I wrote on on the Chancellor's Autumn budget statement?"

James narrowed his eyes, and brought out his smartphone.

"Show me."

It was...quite bad.

..........

Discretion being the better part of most of James' activities, he left Q later on, using the excuse that Q needed to wash and use the loo and change pyjamas. James had arranged for some new ones to be sent in, correctly assuming that the boy had none judging by the bedsit inventory, and that he must sleep in his pants or naked. He'd been pleased to see that Q was wearing one pair of soft cotton blue striped PJs and was going to change into the identical crimson striped pair. 

For now, James tried to avert his thoughts from the image of a slim silhouette clothed in the softest brushed comfort, and adjusted himself as he walked close to midnight towards his destination. He had an appointment with Pete the happy snapper, amateur chemist and dodgy video director. Pete didn't know that, though. Which only made Bond look forward to it all the more....


	7. Justice without mercy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bond deals with Pete.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay I managed a chapter after all! next one will prob be Tues/Weds!

Bond found Pete the photographer, as he was hoping to do, in the early hours of the next morning. His quarry hadn't shown up at either of his drinking haunts (deduced from the books of matches Bond found in the pocket of Pete's leather jacket left in the studio), but there was a stub for a rent cheque with the address written on the back, and Bond discovered from a bit of (technically illegal) interference with a communal post box at the address, that it appeared Pete was staying there. 

He broke in, courtesy of a disgracefully rotten window frame, and then scooted up the stairs to the eight floor. Only the dim glow of the security backup lights lit the bare concrete landing and stairs. He didn't take the lift, too noisy, too public.

He considered busting the door open, but decided on a more subtle approach, deftly picking the lock. He could have knocked, of course, but there were balconies on some of the flats, including this one and he didn't want to allow the possibility of his prey fleeing the scene. 

He knew that what he was about to do, was potentially not going to be welcomed afterwards by some of the earlier victims of this man; that by denying them a chance to look the man in the eye in court, they might feel that he'd had an easy way out. That a long stretch in a segregation unit for sex offenders in prison might be a harder, better punishment than this. But Bond, with all due respect to them, was frankly concerned only with Q, with his safety, with his ability to find closure from this experience and with his ability to finally have a chance at some kind of a life. He didn't understand why the rage burned so deeply and fiercely within him, but instead he followed where it led. 

So, he quietly defeated the unimpressive lock, and let himself silently into the flat.

..............

As soon as he was in, he took out his gun, and started checking the rooms. It didn't take long, there were just two small bedrooms. One was empty; it looked as if the occupant was a night shift worker judging from the pay chits on the bedside table. 

The other room, then. Bond was glad he'd got that one long look at the man's face. He wouldn't have wanted to be uncertain on identifying his man. 

Softly he opened the door to the second bedroom. Soft snoring came from the bed. There were beer cans, full and empty, and a quantity of scrunched up tissues. A TV propped on a chair at the end of the bed confirmed this man's main hobby. Lovely. 

Bond leaned over the bed and roughly shook the man awake. Pete woke with a start, making as if to shout out, but before he could utter a noise, Bond's hand was clamped over his mouth. A knife pressed into the side of his throat.

Pete's eyes bulged, wildly looking up at Bond and blinking at the glare of a head torch now flashing into his face, blinding him from seeing his intruder. The next moment, any chance he had of identifying James disappeared, as a thick wide cloth was placed around his head, blindfolding him, tied tight. 

Bond's voice was quiet and icily cold and calm.

"Get up. Go and sit in the chair."

"W-which chair?"

"The one by the door. Do it now."

The man stumbled across the road, and sat. He was trembling. 

Bond clicked the safety off his revolver, and the man, not being able to see what was happened, promptly pissed himself. 

James screwed up his nose. 

"You know why I'm here, don't you? Those enticing ads, friendly flattery? Doping the kids, then photographing them in all sorts of positions, doing all sorts of stuff? Some of them woke up and didn't remember, I guess, that's right isn't it, and some of them might have remembered but didn't dare to go to the authorities because you told them, you showed them, what photos you had of them. And you threatened them, so you got away with it and they live in fear of those pictures and videos surfacing again.

"So, Peter. Here we are now. Birds home to roost. You made a mistake with that last boy. Because he was too used to having to stay alert for his own safety all his life, and I feel responsible for hitting him as he tried to escape from you, and now I have a tiny weeny soft spot for him. 

"So, your choice, Peter. Either I can go back to the office one round down, and have to send in my colleagues in housekeeping for some deep cleansing, which will irritate my paymasters because, Peter, it will be double time at this hour, and they won't like that. Or, and I would advise you to choose wisely and choose this, you can have the dignity of making your own end, off the balcony, nice and quick, and then the council can clean up, probably still time and a half but the council tax payers will be covering it so I will still get the lemon raisin biscuits with my morning coffee. 

The man sitting in the chair looked completely shocked, terrified, but Bond could only see the still pale face of Q lying unconscious and naked on that road. He felt absolutely no remorse, just irritation that he was having to spend these minutes here, when he could be watching Q sleeping instead. 

Pete evidently didn't make up his mind quickly enough, because about a minute later Bond shot him in the knee. 

He screamed with pain, but was escorted at gun point to the balcony door. 

"You have five seconds before I start shooting you, starting with the other knee."

Pete was begging incoherently now, but, prodded in the back by the gun, he finally dragged himself over the balcony, and slithered off the edge. There was a thump, and then silence. Bond took one look, nodded to himself, and left as quietly as he'd arrived. He'd have to get the office to sort it out, but on the whole, he was satisfied with the night's work. 

................

 

After four or five hours sleep at the flat, uninterrupted by any nightmares or wakefulness, Bond rose and showered. He'd had confirmation that last night's events were duly "cleaned up", and that the "tragic suicide" of "well respected local photographer" Peter Stannard would be just a small footnote in the local paper. 

He breakfasted well, porridge (betraying his Scottish roots) and strong coffee, lots of it. Then he dressed, picked up his keys, phone and gun and headed off to the Chelsea and Westminster once more.

It was almost midday by the time he got there, stopping off at Six to fill out some very scrappily completed paperwork on last night's escapade. He turned in his gun too. Of course he'd already done that once, supposedly, on his return from Acapulco, but Bond had subsequently liberated the Walther when he needed it. Boothroyd was losing his touch at security. Time for a change fairly soon. 

This time, however, he was happy for his weapon to stay where it was meant to be until his next mission. 

...............

When he reached Q's room he was pleased to see that the leg was cast and there was clearly more mobility, using crutches. Q was concentrating hard, watched by a physio nurse, and Bond leaned against the doorway as the pyjama clad Q (sadly with one PJ leg sliced to the thigh to allow for the cast) hobbled around the room. Q had taken off his glasses, in case he tripped and fell, and was clearly as blind as a bloody bat without the things, as the physio was having more trouble trying to stop him crashing into things, than falling whilst in open space. 

It was only when Q had sat down heavily, dog-tired, on the side of his hospital bed, that he put his specs back on and saw Bond in the doorway. The smile he gave James was fleeting but brilliant and devastating. James felt a thud in his gut. He'd felt it once before, but only once, and that wench was dead, too. Vesper. 

"Oh, fuck me", thought Bond. "He might not be jailbait, but I could be in deep trouble here." 

He still didn't know what it was, exactly? There was definitely something elemental about Q,full of contradictions, soft but with a steel wire, core, human and yet wildly other-worldly. Maybe no one else saw it? Maybe it was specific to Bond's view of him, like a quantum experiment, his looking altered it for everyone else so they never saw what he did. The boy was a mass of contradictions, and James always did love a fiendishly complicated riddle.

He walked into the room, looking more confident than he felt inside. Madness, that this kid was able to do this to him...

"Hello, Q."


	8. Q leaves hospital

It had occurred to James, as he travelled to the hospital that his own feelings might be inconvenient and messy, but he had little idea of what Q might be thinking. Q had been generous in forgiveness, friendly while hospital bed, but beyond that Bond had no idea what Q's opinions were. He actually didn't even know if Q was gay; although his instincts strongly suggested that he was, it was possible Q might not even know it himself. 

"Maybe he just thinks of me as a father figure. Maybe not even that much? Maybe he's just grateful to the man who, in a roundabout way, extracted him from a frightening situation?" 

Realising that he was also old enough to actually be Q's father did, predictably enough, not raise his spirits any further, and it was only that dazzling smile from the mop-haired teen which buoyed him and deterred him from the urge to simply turn tail and shut the door on the whole mess. 

But that smile was there, all he needed to see, so he really needed to find out what Q felt. Even if that meant artificially prolonging their acquaintance.

..........

Q for his part, was nervous, ever since he had noticed that Bond had been absent for a number of hours last night. He knew that the agent was likely to go looking for Pete, and that Pete had little left to lose. He was also worried, more prosaically, about exactly where he was going to go once he left hospital. To return to his bedsit with no computer equipment to distract him from his cramped and lonely existence was almost unbearable to contemplate. Bond had told him he would deal with Pete, but that wouldn't change Q's outlook that much, grateful though he was. It all made his head ache. He couldn't deal with all that now. So he ignored it.

"Did you go looking for Pete last night?"

Bond sat down in the chair next to the bed, and fiddled idly with a lighter. He was clearly considering how best to word his reply. Tension showed in his facial muscles. He was all muscle really, lean and spare. Q wondered what James would think of his own body, pale and thin, unscarred, soft, inexperienced.

"Looked for him, found him, had a little chat." James' voice broke rudely into Q's thoughts. He started a little.

"Oh...oh. Did he say anything about me?"

James sighed.

"He was... a little lost for words. He met with an accident, I'm afraid, Q."

Their eyes met, locked.

"You..."

"Helped him make the right decision, that's all."

Q looked down, worrying at the frays in his pyjama trousers where they were cut up to cover the cast on his leg. He was quiet for a long time, at least a minute. When he looked up, Bond was slightly shocked to see there were tears in Q's eyes. 

Q wiped his arm across his face, leaving streaks, and then pushed his heavy fringe out of his eyes.

"I just - I feel sorry for him. Not that he didn't do wrong things, he did, it was disgusting, but sorry that he couldn't, or didn't, stop himself before things got that far?" 

James leaned in. His face was dark and each word was precisely and quietly spoken. 

"Don't be bloody sorry for him. Don't feel guilty, either, not for one minute. We all make choices, Q, we all have a chance to choose our own direction whatever cards we're dealt. His choice was selfish, and damaged lives; not just yours, others' too. His offending was increasing, I saw the evidence. Don't waste your tears on mourning him. Mourn the starving child, the raped woman, the teenage empty-eyed soldier. Not him. Never him, Q."

Q nodded, blinking back more tears. All of a sudden, Bond found two thin arms clutching him around his middle, and tensed rigid. He was hair-trigger alert for unexpected movements, and while he had for example screwed a lot of women for the sake of pillow talk to aid his missions, which clearly necessitated close contact, he always made sure that it was he who took all the initiative, he who had line of sight to the door at all times and he who made any sudden movements. 

Q had grabbed him and was clinging on, and James was struggling within himself not to throw the boy to the floor and shout and scream at him for being so bloody stupid as to risk his own safety by doing this. Using his unarmed combat skills to swiftly put the hostile to the floor and pin him there, heedless of his leg in plaster neck and arm locked, air supply denied, until Bond's heart rate would allow him to move away safely. 

He found himself, extraordinarily, doing none of those things. Instead, although taut-strung as a longbow and sweating with the effort, he allowed the boy to maintain his embrace, Q's head buried in his chest, tears dampening his shirt. 

Neither moved for an age, at least, it felt like that to James. It was only when he came back to himself that he realised that his calloused and tanned fingers of his right hand were gently stroking the black-brown glossy hair, and that Q was sighing softly. 

...............

 

It was decided that Q would stay with Bond. At least, Bond decided that - and no one who might have been in a position to have demurred, felt able to voice their opinion. Only Mallory was frank, telling Bond that he was due back on a mission soon, and distractions were not welcome, especially distractions in the form of an underfed guttersnipe who appeared to have been through most of the U.K's military secrets like a rat down a drainpipe. Gareth was clearly finding it hard to accept that Q had just been having fun, trying to not be bored....Moneypenny was less forthright, but more obviously concerned. 

'It's not that I'm miffed at you bonking every target's girlfriend in the Western World and then deciding all of a sudden that you're going to turn for a very young, very naive twink who will not know what the hell hit them, but I am very jolly bloody miffed that it's so out of the blue, James. I thought we were friends, close friends, and you even never breathed a word!"

"Moneypenny ", James sighed. "I am so old, so venerable, that when I joined the Service, any whiff of lavender and you'd be drummed out at best, and at worst doing time in the nonce's wing at Brixton prison on some trumped-up charges. Besides, I do - usually - prefer women. 

I'm not sleeping with Q, and I won't be issuing future bulletins on the subject. He's staying at my flat from tomorrow when he leaves hospital, because I have a lift, and a helpful doorman, and a housekeeper who is willing to check on him and sometimes make a snack so that the ridiculous boy doesn't starve. And that's it. Now, if you can stick to gossip about your own scandalous life, and leave mine out of it, that would be perfect."

"Hmmmmm", sniffed Moneypenny, flicking over the pages of a deathly dull set of minutes and clearly not reading a word of it. This conversation, she decided, was not over. Not by a long chalk.

............

It took some time the following day to get the pale and frankly emaciated figure of Q into a wheelchair, with all his belongings in a sports bag on his lap, resting on his bony knees, and out of the hospital into a car provided by Six. It wasn't that far to the flat, and James found himself feeling oddly nervous about what Q would think of where he lived. Actually, he wasn't only nervous about that. In hospital, there was an air of unreality, an ability to dispense with all the usual practical considerations of life, and a sense of being in a bubble. That made it easier to act on your instincts, because it didn't really count.

Now, he felt like a stranger from the youth sitting next to him in the car, cast propped awkwardly and eyes flicking from one seat to another, out of the window, out of the other window. Never at James. James wondered if he was doing the right thing. He felt kind of ridiculous.

When they got to the flat, the driver helped Q out while James got the wheelchair and Q lowered himself heavily into the chair seat. It was electric so James walked behind. They got into the foyer, and Q spoke for the first time that morning, to thank the doorman for propping open both doors for the wheelchair, and then exclaiming at the stunning Art Deco architecture of the place. He'd expected Bond to live in some brand new minimalist block, James knew, and relished the element of surprising Q, who was clearly loving the nautical lines and sweeping staircases, even if he was, for now, having to use the lift himself. James smiled, he loved it too, he always had done. 

Bond might have chosen a period building to live in, but he made sure it worked for him. His flat was on the top floor, the eleventh, and took up the whole space. The lift had originally opened directly into the living room, using a key to control floor access like the other flats on the lower floors. But for security, there was now a lobby, allowing extra bombproofing. So it wasn't until they opened the lobby door that Q got his first sight of the flat's interior. 

It was worth waiting for.


	9. Surprising developments

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q moves into James' flat. Everyone in Ml6 thinks they're shagging. Are they? and what of Q's future?

The first impression Q got as he wheeled himself into the main living room was light. Windows, mirrors, brushed steel and bright chrome. There were doors opening onto a small sheltered balcony and the floor was cream marble. Everywhere, curves and sinuous shapes, geometric designs and natural forms. 

Q didn't know what to say. It just wasn't what he'd expected. 

'It's very...nice.'

Bond narrowed his eyes but said nothing, just busied himself bringing in what little luggage had been brought over from Q's miserable bedsit. It totalled (minus the currently hostage computer kit) two suitcases, and they weren't even full. 

Q was biting his lip, ill at ease. He didn't know what the arrangement was, here, exactly. He didn't want to get out of a frying pan and into a fire after the whole Pete affair, but nor did he want James to treat him as some dependent child, more of a burden than a pleasure to have around. He felt something deep in his gut when he looked at Bond, something that drew him to the agent with a force whose power was starting to shock him, a bit. Maybe it was Daddy issues, but Q didn't think he was looking for a father figure. He wanted to get closer to Bond, much closer. His cursed leg was not a help, though. 

"Where would you like me to put my things?"

(Translation. "Where should I sleep? Is it where you sleep? Is that the whole deal here? Because I know about your reputation Mr Bond, never knowingly letting a shag opportunity pass you by. And there's definitely something in your eyes, a fire. Even at my age, I know that when I see it.)

Q realised he hadn't heard the answer, but saw Bond gesturing towards a door off the living room. He rolled over to it and wheeled himself into the large room. Bond followed with the case, putting them on the bed so they were chair height for Q to unpack. 

Q looked up at James as he put the second suitcase down. 

"Thankyou. For everything. I...don't know what I would have done, if I had to go back to my place, in the wheelchair I'd be a target for - well, for some people."

"No problem." James' face was closer now, and just for a moment his hand rested on Q's shoulder, thumb stroking absently. Q wondered if he realised he was doing it but was pleased either way. Deliberate was good, and so was unconsciously instinctive. Q turned his face towards James and leaned in towards him, hoping that James would kiss him. That he could feel the warmth of his breath, and the iron-hard lines of his body pressed against him. He felt warmth rising, in his cheeks, and in his groin.

Instead, suddenly James leaped up, away from the bed and waved his hand in the air. 

"I'll let you get in with unpacking. I'll order in food. Then, we'll talk."

With that, he was gone, and Q kicked the bed leg in frustrated embarrassment. He'd clearly read it all wrong, and making life very awkward for James. The talk sounded ominous, he'd already made a fool of himself and he'd only been here a few minutes. Shit. This was going to be awful, and he'd thought it would be so good. 

............

Dinner was a little bit awkward. Q was used to a diet of Doritos and Haribo, and that intermittent. To be faced with a plate of pasta with carbonara sauce delivered from a local Italian restaurant was verging on a mountain to be climbed. He picked at bits of ham and swirled the pasta around the plate. 

Eventually, James, who always ate well, when he got a chance to, put down his fork and sighed. 

"I've got this all wrong. Haven't I? You're vegetarian, or coeliac, or allergic to lactose, or..."

Q smiled shyly, eyes crinkling under his fringe. 

"No! Nothing like that. It's just a lot, and very rich. I haven't been used to it. Not in hospital and definitely not before that."

"Shit, I am so bloody stupid. I'm so sorry, Q. Would you like something else, something plain? Cereal? Toast? Chips?"

Q shook his head. 

"What I've had was lovely, I just can't eat any more."

Bond looked over at his drooping eyelids. 

"You should rest. I have some paperwork to occupy me. When you wake up l'll run a bath for you, get rid of that hospital feeling."

"That sounds perfect. Thankyou." Q looked not a million miles away from tears, whether from fatigue, relief at being out of hospital or gladness that James seemed to have put the awkwardness of earlier on behind them.

...........

It was very obvious over the coming days and weeks that the whole of MI6 had been holding its collective breath. Sweepstakes were established, rumours whispered, and manip screensavers created by the more artistically inclined.

And...nothing. No one could establish with any degree of confidence that Bond was in a relationship, a slightly scandalous relationship at that, with the slight wisp of a youth whose IT activities had now been scoured out of numerous government and NGO computer systems. 

The conclusion on Q from a security perspective had landed on M's desk with a thud one Friday morning. Mallory flicked through it, read through it, and then took a highlighter and marked several passages. 

Then he asked to see Bond. 

James turned up sweating from a gym session, still in his gym gear. Mallory slightly envied Bond's almost fanatical determination to remain field agent fit. He knew he couldn't do it, year in, year out. 

James sat down, waiting politely, although he'd read the cover of the file on the desk the second he walked into the room. 

"Your...lodger. Q. All going well is it, James?"

Bond nodded, giving little away. 

"Very well, thankyou sir. Apart from him talking about getting a kitten. He's mad on cats, no one told me that. Or two kittens. Out of the question."

Mallory hummed. 

"I - Need to ask you about the nature of your relationship. As you know, the liberalisation of social attitudes and legislation means that same sex relationships are treated like any heterosexual one these days, so I'm only asking because as you know, any established relationship needs to be disclosed for security reasons. Especially where one of the parties has a murky past with their interactions with the U.K. Government and its secure information systems."

"Of course."

James really wasn't making this easy. Mallory began to get impatient.

"Bond. You've been living with the lad for four months. You never live with anyone. Anyone who sees the two of you can see that you are attracted to one another. You have a reputation for screwing anything that moves. I'm finding it a little hard to accept that you are nothing more than a very odd pair of housemates."

Bond scowled. 

"I am going to say this once, M, and not repeat it. I am not sleeping with, screwing, fucking or laying my holy hands on Q. I have not, and, for the foreseeable future, I will not."

M looked nonplussed. 

"So who are you having sex with?"

"No one, sir."

"No one? You can't expect me to believe...

James stood up.

"I don't particularly care if you believe me or not, sir. I am capable of self restraint. We all have the fallback option of our right hand and some online footage, after all."

He leaned in. 

"Q is eighteen. He needs to work out what he wants. If I am what he wants. If you security clear him, and give him some decent kit, and send him to Oxford to do maths and computing, he can have some freedom to do that within a safe structured environment. Then, he can come and work here. Not as a field agent, he hates the idea of flying, but as a tech. Maybe even Q branch. Boothroyd can't go on forever."

M looked as if he was still in shock at the Bond celibacy revelation but recovered enough to continue. He tried to sound friendlier, as he was concerned for Bond.

"Aren't you worried, James. That you'll send him off to university and he'll return a stranger, if he returns at all?"

"Of course I am. But at the moment, he doesn't have the capacity to decide objectively. He needs to know what he's rejecting if he chooses me. And he'll be older. Which in the context of a yawningly wide age gap, is kind of helpful."

"And in the event that finding out means that he doesn't come back the innocent our research suggests he is?"

"I'm in no position to slut shame any of my partners, male or female, sir. Q will decide if knowledge gathering requires ultimate intimacy. I will not ask and he can choose if he decides to tell me or not. Either way, I will see it only as proving the strength of the decision he ultimately makes. 

"I will, though, be making my own feelings towards him clear. So I have a small favour to ask..."

Twenty minutes later, Bond left Mallory's office and headed to a desk to make some calls. 

Mallory sat shaking his head in disbelief.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ha! So many people thought they'd be in bed before sundown, when I'd already mapped out that it was the opposite. Basically, James has a specific visceral distaste for men who isolate and groom their partners, especially when they are either very young or much younger. He wants Q to choose him, but he wants it to be an informed choice, any other kind is not a choice at all. 
> 
> It's remarkable behaviour from Bond, but it's a different scenario now. The years are ticking by, and Bond won't be in the field forever. Provided he survives, he wants someone special. And he needs to make the right foundations for that. What we don't know, is does Q agree with going away and no sex?!!!


	10. Oxford

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q is pressed into going away, to be a normal student and teenager. Neither Q or Bond find the early weeks easy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wadham College isn't my own college at Oxford (I was at a different one) but it does have a reputation for being gay/women friendly and non conformist friendly, and the lawns are fabulous.
> 
> Queen's Lane Coffee House is real, and one of, if not the, oldest extant coffee houses in England. It's so old that it was open when I was an undergrad and I'm delighted it's still there. The Botanic Gardens are a hidden gem. The Randolph serves excellent food but is the parents treat it's labelled, students are more likely to be getting a chilli kebab from a van on St Aldates or Broad Street.
> 
> Sub fusc is the black and white academic attire at Oxford which is worn for formal Hall dinners and exams. It has survived attempts to abolish it.

Chapter 9

 

Of course, it wasn't easy to say goodbye to Q, not when it actually came to it. His leg healed, just the scars and the slight limp, James drove him to Wadham, his new college at Oxford, chosen because it had a reputation for being hospitable to nerds and queers. Beautiful gardens, too, large lawns, excellent for exercising Q's compromised leg, and great for picking through a maths problem. Unpacked, the small room (ground floor because of the leg) with the twelve pane windows looking out onto the lawns looked cosy and bright, but Bond had never felt so dismal. For the first time in his life, he thought he was at risk of feeling truly lonely once he walked out of here today.

It wasn't that it had all been plain sailing having Q living at home. To be fair about it, not really "sailing" at all, more like dodgems. Several times, cats had appeared in the flat which Q claimed were strays, until, each time, the cat was taken to a vet and scanned, found to be chipped and have a loving owner and home, and returned. His culinary habits were, frankly, life threatening. He seemed to have no concept of the existence of food poisoning. At first, James felt rude enquiring about what exactly the odd brown mess of the food comprised, how old it was, and what it died of, but in the end he just issued an outright ban on Q making anything other than something in a tin on toast or a baked potato. Q had accepted this, just looking rather sad and forlorn. After that, there was just burned toast and associated smoke alarm issues to manage.

There were also the IT issues. James had computer equipment of course, but nothing on the scale of what Q managed to specify that MI6 should get him. Q's room was filled almost completely with racking and servers and all sorts of stuff. It was always stifling hot, quite smelly in a teenage boy kind of way, and the layers of Red Bull cans and cheap deodorant added to this cocktail made for a fairly robust fog. 

Despite all this, despite it all, James had grown used to coming home from Six, or back from an overseas mission, and hearing Q swearing at a faulty component, or singing in his sweet thin reedy tenor voice to some obscure Faroese folk singer (his tastes in music were eclectic to say the least). Bond had grown used to the idea that there might be an actual grime line around a bathtub and water slopped onto the floor if he used it after Q. And he'd grown used to a strange world in which the two men parted at a late hour and retired to bed, separately, alone, only to both each hear faint sounds of the other masturbating, knowing that the other was thinking of them as they climaxed.

.............

When James had raised the subject of Oxford, Q had initially rejected the idea, believing that James had grown tired of him; that Bond wanted his life back, that Q was cramping his style. It had taken literally days to convince Q that this was about him, not Bond, that Q needed to experience the same things as other young people, and that James was not going to negotiate on that. Q took a lot of convincing.

"I just can't accept that if I am away for three years, that there will be a place for me here when I finally finish? I don't mean...you know...just, even as a friend, and as somewhere to call home? I know you think I need to see if I should move on from this, from you, but I'm more worried that it's YOU, James, who will do that. You feel responsible for me, I get that, but that's when I'm here. When I'm ok, at uni, you won't need to feel that. And that's good, it really is, but it terrifies me that we will drift away, through no-ones fault, and it will never be like it is now, like it has been."

Bond knew what he meant, the quiet evenings playing chess or reviewing Q's latest design for some gadget or plan to disrupt hostile groups, or eating the bacterially safer option of takeaway. The occasional stroke of hand or hair, and meeting of gazes.

All he could do was acknowledge, try to reassure Q, and inwardly try to reassure himself too. 

............

And now, here they were, at the moment of parting. There was nothing more to do, or organise, and Q was due at a welcome meeting in Hall in twenty minutes.

James meant to pat Q on the back and then go, but as his hand touched the back of Q's neck, he felt his fingers curl. One kiss, just one bloody kiss. It was all he'd have for the next two months to sustain him, and he wasn't going to deny himself just this, just the chance to taste those lips and feel the softness of that skin. 

James leaned around and pressed his pale lips to Q's own red ones. He breathed, and cupped Q's neck. He could see the green eyes, dark-lashes curling, dark brows furrowed in concentration. There was an instant electrical surge, and right from that first moment, Bond felt like he was drowning, enveloped in a soft pulsing world where he could hear little and see less, muffled sweetness and where he was desperate to stay. 

He heard a small noise, a hum and a sigh, a good one, a happy one, and looked at Q, lips still together. Q looked flushed and very very happy. 

They parted, at length. Q collected his sub fusc for his trip to Hall and address by the Principal and the Dean. James gathered up his keys and wallet and, leaving three hundred pounds on the chest of drawers, left College via the porter's lodge, with its pigeonholes for letters and cases of wine being delivered for the college cellars. 

He ripped up the two parking tickets, got in the Aston, and headed far too fast down the M40 back to London. A full bottle of twenty year old Balvenie had his name on it, and it...wasn't full by morning. 

............

Bond was sent straight out onto a mission on his return: M made it clear that he'd had too much downtime and now that he was "free of his responsibility" (which made Bond's hackles bristle), he was on the next plane to fucking Libya. A ten day mission turned into a month long bloodbath, which he nearly didn't get out of, and by the time James was next in the UK, he was wondering why the hell he did this job. He got patched up by the medics, turned in what fragmentary and misshapen remains were left of his inventory to Q branch, and planned to head straight home. He'd managed to talk to Q only twice since leaving him at Wadham, both times before the Libya mission started, as that required complete radio silence.

..........

It was fourth week of Michaelmas term in Oxford and the leaves were falling in Walton street, bright colours against the honey coloured stone. The Virginia creeper was crimson waves on college walls, and the wisteria draped from mullions, its fabulous racemes of baby blue flowers now just a memory. It was cold and crisp, so still was the air, like the city was holding its breath for winter. The Chilterns get very cold like this. It was pretty, but Bond just worried that Q might have a chill. He was too thin to get ill.

They met for lunch. There were better places to eat food wise than the Randolph, but it was reliable and swish - and it was only when waiting for Q that Bond realised every other patron was a student with their parents treating them. Fuck. He was going to, at best, look like Q's dad, at worst like some dodgy distant relative with pervy designs on the young man. 

So when Q arrived, hair slightly damp, anorak neatly zipped and scarf tied snug, James met him in the foyer, took him gently by the arm and swung him right around and back out the golden oak doors onto Broad Street. 

"James??"

"Don't worry. It's all fine. I just changed my mind about where we are going to have lunch."

So it was that the two men were to be found spending their lunch date perched on stools at a counter, eating bacon baguettes and huge mugs of well aged filter coffee in the Queen's Lane Coffee House. Q got a bit of the rather vinegary tomato ketchup on his cheek, and Bond reached across with a tissue and wiped it away. The touch made them both jump.

After lunch, such as it was, they visited the Botanic Gardens across the road, and then walked through the Magdalen deer park. Eventually, they stopped at a bench. Time to talk.


	11. Impasse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q and Bond clash over Bond's moral qualms about their relationship.

In the shade of the deer park, under the huge beech and broadleaved lime trees, bare now of their crown of leaves, Q talked about the month he had spent at Oxford so far. How he didn't understand the rowers who got up in the dark to train on freezing waters. How he'd been to a couple of Oxford Union debates and found the beer cheap and the speeches full of in-jokes, but that he liked the Old Library with its preRaphaelite murals on the ceiling, which lit up if you put a pound coin in a slot. How he hated Formal Hall in college, with its small talk and awkwardness, but loved the buildings, if it wasn't for his hay fever which continued even this late into November. 

He didn't talk about the other students, or a social life. After a while, he seemed to lose momentum in his chatter. Bond suspected he'd prepared his topics to talk about. He allowed Q to continue to a natural pause. 

"Tell me what you really think, Q."

"Really? All right. I like the college, the buildings and the grounds. I like my scout who cleans my room and the porters in the Lodge. But overall? I hate it. I hate it because I can see the people who arrived her having been the cleverest in their school and feted for getting a place, can see those people visibly wilting as they realise that here, here they will never be more than below average, and they'd have done better to have walked a first from a redbrick uni than to have believe themselves worthy of this place. The worst cases even end up in the local secure unit, it's full of undergrads who can't take the pressure.

I don't enjoy being a spectator to this life. There's so much opportunity, and yet while those highs are intoxicating, the lows are even more so."

James swallowed hard. 

"What about you, though Q. Forget the others for a moment, just for a second. How are you finding it in relation to other people. Have you made friends, at all? Or relationships? I know it's very early days for that." 

That last part was all supposed to be integral to this exercise. Make him spread his wings. Make him taste the range of experiences on offer. Oxford probably had the richest feast in that respect. Bond just hadn't considered that for someone so starved of friendship and love and kinship bonding, such a feast might produce only nausea and fear, rather than delight and acceptance. Nor that the act of asking produced a bitter knot of fear in his stomach which he made sure his face did not betray.

Q shook his head. 

"I don't think I know how you would go about making friends. I don't think I would have anything to offer to a friend. What they might want or need, how that would work? 

"Relationships? I don't want to have a relationship with anyone. Not unless... Not here. I just do my work, and then do the extra work I want, and then I sit in my room and listen to music. And I sit there and wonder why you are imprisoning me here, when I could be in London with you? You could be killed on your missions, you probably will be, and I'd have been here, exiled like Solon, not knowing it was your last moments until they told me after the fact, when they got round to it."

He shook his head. 

"I can see from your face that you're shocked and that you are not going to be allowIng me to come back with you. But you asked me the question, and so I answered it truthfully. I deserve, don't I, that if I have to go through this, that you know how painful it is?"

"I want to come home. With you. In every sense."

Bond tried to stay calm, to stay rational. He had no problem with that, of course he didn't. It's what he did, after all. His job. His life. He failed.

"Q, I can't do what you're asking."

"You can, but you won't. I hate you."

"Ok, I won't, then. Stop behaving like a little kid throwing their toys out of the buggy. It doesn't suit you."

Q looked at him, tears streaking his cheeks.

"Why does it matter? Why do you care how I behave? I can do what I like, because you are. You don't want me around so that you don't have to feel guilty, about my age, or maybe it's just that you don't want other people thinking that? Yeah, maybe that's it? Don't want to be labelled a cradle snatcher, eh? Borderline paedophile? Make you uncomfortable? 

"Well, I've got news for you. I'm legal and I've had to live the kind of life where you grow up bloody early and bloody fast. So if you don't want me, fine. I'll find someone who does. I can't imagine it will be hard to find someone in Gaysoc who fancies deflowering a fresher? Apparently it's something of a sport, though I don't think you can win a Blue for it." 

James, white with frustration and rage, took him by the shoulders and shook him. He knew Q was doing this deliberately, provoking, taunting.

"Don't. Just don't. You know I want you. You KNOW that. You KNOW. And you know why all this is necessary, even if you don't like it. It's to protect you from harm, to give you the chance to see others, make an objective decision. You're not stupid. Why can't you recognise that?"

"I can. But I don't think you have the right to demand it. Take me or leave me, is what you are entitled to do. But not to lock me up, and get on with your life? Do you know what it's like, to be here, alone, at night, lying there knowing that you're on some mission thousands of miles away, fucking someone else, some woman, just on the off chance that you are such a great lay that she'll shed state secrets as well as her G-string?"

Bond sighed, rubbing his hand over his face. He'd looked forward to seeing Q again all month, holed up in a bombed out corner of Tripoli, and now he was here and Q was here and was nothing more than a spitting bloody feral. 

"It's my job, Q. All of it. The travel, the guns, the explosives, the diplomacy, the bribery and, yes, the fucking. It's all I know. What else would you have me do?" 

Q shrugged. 

"I don't know. I - don't know."

"Okay. So when you do know, Q, maybe you'd like to let me know? In the meantime, stay put, stay focused and get yourself an education and mix more. Forget about me for a bit. As you remind me, I do bad things. Maybe I'm a bad man."

Bond looked at his watch. 

I'm due at Heathrow for a flight. Just - hang on will you, hang on in there. We'll have Christmas. You get three weeks vac."

As he left - they didn't kiss - he pressed an envelope into Q's hands. 

"Don't read it until I've gone. It's something of an incentive, a bribe if you like."

.............

With that, James was gone, furious frustration swallowed up by the frozen mist swirling up from the river. Q stared at the envelope, but did not open it, and a few minutes late rose from the bench to make his slightly limping progress back to Wadham. The envelope burned a hole in his pocket, and he touched the rough weave cartridge paper. He refused to speculate on the contents.


	12. Q gets a visitor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eve and Q have a heart to heart over sad dusty bottles of alcohol

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise smut will come...just not today...:-)

Q didn't open that envelope, and didn't intend to open it for the whole four weeks of that term remaining. Instead, he worked hard, made an effort to 'mix' a little more, and then returned to college stone cold sober and cried himself to sleep, eyeing the crisp cream envelope on the mantel shelf. He didn't open it, because he feared that it would hold hurdles, tests, standards that Bond needed him to meet. To have a certain number of friends, even a number of partners, to get certain grades.

Only the last of these wasn't a problem. 

Q stood in front of the full length mirror in the bathroom down the corridor, and tried to critique what others might think of him. Just thin, too thin. No arse, ribs showing, bony shoulders and skinny legs. Even to a partner with a taste for youthful twinks (a term Q had come to know on his only outing to date to Gaysoc drinks), he wasn't a catch. 

He did have some things going for him. His hair was dark, wavy and lustrous, and a low hairline enabled him to allow it to become quite wild. His green eyes were framed by long black-brown lashes, and his lips were full and naturally red. 

Basically he was great from the neck up and a dead loss the other way. His cock wasn't his saviour either. It was ordinary, respectable, uncut like almost all British men, and in no way exceptional, though he was moderately fond of it.

Q sighed, and finished washing and shaving. He had good facial hair genes. Not exactly a knockout blow, that. Gay men could be just as cruel as "breeders" when it came to critiquing potential partners.

.............

James didn't visit again that term, spending most of the month in a cat and mouse chase with a Mexican drug lord. Q got only odd texts and occasional scribbled postcards from locations that looked very unlike any holiday resort brochure.

But Eve did come. Moneypenny turned up one Friday night in a large black car, managing to squash it into the Gloucester Green car park's tiddly parking bays, and was waiting for Q when he returned from Formal Hall, gown flowing. He blinked. The door to his room had been locked, and Eve was sitting in it, on the bed. He supposed lock picking was a level one skill, and didn't ask. 

"Eve."

"Hallo, Q. Hope you don't mind me dropping in. M was keen that I check you were doing okay, given 007's extended absence. Are you doing okay?"

She looked slightly embarrassed, but genuine in her questions. Q decided not to be awkward about it, though he resented being treated like a kid.

"You can tell M that, yes. I am fine. Probably more fine in 007's absence than in his presence, if I'm quite honest. I haven't turned to a life of drinking clubs and debauchery, so M won't have to have me picked up from the gutter in a back street of Naples quite yet." 

He moved to sit down on the plain beech chair that clashed with the classical lines of the room, but was deemed appropriate furnishing for the modern undergraduate.

"Would you like a drink? I don't drink much myself, but I have some"...(peering at bottles)..."rather unpleasant cider and some pink sparkling wine? Presents from people, I'm not sure why."

Eve smiled at him. 

"You know, I think I will, Q. I'm staying at the Malmaison so no need to drive back to town so I can let my hair down. I don't suppose you have any little umbrellas or a nice cherry for my drink, do you?"

............

They both got very drunk, which took about a thimbleful in Q's case and rather more in Moneypenny's. Eve got a fit of the giggles, which set Q off. 

As with all drinking sessions, though, the dividing line between someone being gleeful and morose is a thin one, quickly crossed. 

"Why are you really here, Eve?" Q stared down into his drink, and fiddled with the rim of the glass, not meeting her eyes. 

Eve looked at his desk, not at him, eyeing the stack of papers with squiggled numbers and equations. It looked like alchemy recipes to her. She was fluent in more languages than anyone else in Six, but maths. No, maths left her cold. 

She wondered how to word her reply.

"I came to try to convince you not to be too hard on Bond."

Q interrupted with the passion unique to the young who feels themselves wronged.

"Hard on him? He's the one who has exiled me here? Who would practically set up dates for me with boys, if he could? Who won't have me at home with him! But dangles me, instead, like a dying fish, for his sport. How is that me being hard on him? All I do is sit in my room and work, whilst he shags every mark going and keeps me in the little compartment he's made in his head?"

Eve shook her head. 

"You really don't get it, do you? I thought you were meant to be all lined up for Q branch once you finish here, that you were in M's words, 'really very bright', which he NEVER says about anyone? You're being very dense, considering!

Bond is paying you the highest compliment that he can. You're right, he's an alley cat, he always has been. He's a ruthless loner who fights his way out of trouble and he fucks his way out just as readily. And he is, yes, I know, smothering you with restrictions to an extent, he knows that too.

.............

She was in full flow now, her dark hair shining by the lamplight. She had lovely skin, Q noticed. Flawless. 

"I know James. He was lost after Vesper, after he trusted her and she betrayed him so terribly. He's still lost, to an extent. He's desperate, to the point of madness, not to fail again at anything, at work, and especially in any relationship. And he knows he's awful at them.

He's taking more risks with himself physically because he knows he's getting too old for this game, but he's doing the minimum he can of pillow talk and sex. He's drinking less. He's working out more. He's miserable and he's lonely, and all he talks about when I speak to him is you. You, Q. You've put a spell on him and he's drowning unless you help him.

With a wobbly finger, Eve pointed at the mantelpiece. At the envelope.

"That's 007's writing. What's he writing to you for? What does it say. Sorry to be so nosey but I'm nosey and quite pissed"

Q smiled, feeling woozy, 

"I haven't opened it. I've had it for three weeks. I know I need to before term ends. Otherwise I'll go back to London and he'll expect me to know."

Eve grabbed him by the shoulders - quite hard - with that physical enthusiasm that is characteristic of the drunk.

"Open it."

Q considered the matter for a moment, as best he could through the fog of his alcohol-fuzzed brain. Then he wove his way to the mantelpiece, took the envelope, and opened it clumsily. 

Inside was a short note and two items, identical to each other. The note said simply "I am not a good person. I don't understand what other people need from me. Try to be forgiving." With the note were two small leather objects, fleece lined. Cat collars. Attached to these a tag said simply: "Finish your studies and these may be of use. I believe kittens sometimes need homes, like quartermasters in waiting. "

Q blinked. He didn't have a home. The only place a cat could live - the only place two cats could live - was James' own flat. And James didn't like cats. And cats live for a very long time.

Moneypenny had read the note over his shoulder, and looked about as smug as someone who isn't a politician can do. 

"What should I do, Eve?" His voice sounded a little panicky.

"I do have sympathy, you know Q. I think Bond is taking the propriety thing a little too far. So, I suggest you work hard for the last days of term, go home, and seduce our smitten agent by whatever means necessary?"

Q smiled at her. 

"I may need some tips"

She tapped her fingers on his arm. 

"More than happy dear boy, unless it's in the technical mechanics area of the whole man on man thing, which you might be better talking to someone else about..."

Q blushed. 

"I'll walk you to your hotel."


	13. The end of term and a stranger's advice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Term finishes and Q heads to London to fight for his place at Bond's side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a heads up that updates will continue prob twice weekly, and also that the rating might go up to E soon...;-)

It was the end of Eighth week, and the end of term. The smells of Christmas hung in the air with goose and venison and poultry hanging on display in the Covered Market, and roasted chestnuts on braziers hawked by swarthy men in grubby mittens at Carfax Tower. Harassed parents played dodge the traffic wardens, the Oxford subspecies of which who were known for being especially zealous, and more so at this time of year than any other. 

Q's belongings were being stored, there being sufficiently little that space could be found. So he took the train, speeding through the Oxfordshire countryside heading for West London, and the cramped delights of Paddington Station. 

Bond's letter sat burning a hole in his anorak pocket. He'd managed to find a seat, one at a table, but was squashed up against a rather large man who sniffed continually, and opposite a twinkly grey-haired lady who was by herself, but whose luggage was occupying the next seat. Q hoped no one would get nasty about it, there really wasn't anywhere else for her to put it. All the available racks were crammed with student luggage and badly wrapped Christmas presents. The aisles were full of people too, looking worn out and harassed by Yule. 

Q passed the time by drinking terrible coffee he'd bought at the kiosk at Oxford station and writing a list of ways he was going to persuade Bond that he didn't need to go back to Oxford and he could stay in London instead. 

At Reading, the only stop, halfway through the hour long journey, the fat man got off, along with some of those standing nearby. Q could stretch a little, the man being replaced by a much slimmer guy who was intent only on his game of online scrabble.

Q was deep in concentration when he heard a clearing of a throat, and realised that the grey haired lady was speaking to him.

"You look very sad, young man. I hope you don't mind me being nosy? I have a terrible habit of reading upside down writing."

Q was intrigued but also impressed. Not offended. Malice and needless violence offended him, not cheek.

"How did you manage that?"

She laughed. It was a lovely laugh, and Q realised she was very old, but must have been really quite stunning until quite quite late in life. The bone structure that made for a hollow scaffold now, would have made her beautiful and striking then.

"I'm afraid when your speciality is Norse runic and other early scripts, reading the lovelorn thoughts of the young upside down is really no great challenge. But it is very rude, and I am very sorry. Can I give you a toffee to make up?"

Q smiled. 

"That would be lovely. Did you just read what I wrote, or do you have any wisdom to impart? Also, I don't know your name?"

"I am Rosalind Miles. I'm a fellow of St Hugh's. And a University Reader. And Dean, the dreary part, which means I get to deal with a lot of undergraduate travails, and the fallout from them. Especially the love affairs, at least when they impact on behaviour or work standards, which they generally do."

Q shook her hand. 

"I'm reading Maths and Computing, I'm only in my first year."

"Do you live in London?"

Q nodded. "Yes, in as much as I live anywhere?"

Rosalind sighed. "I got that impression, from the notes you were writing? Your partner and you are at odds over your studies and your coming to Oxford, and it has produced a deep division."

Q nodded. "He thinks I'm too young, and should live a bit, see more of life, and in a few years maybe we will live together. He's trying to bribe me with getting kittens if I finish Oxford."

"Oh dear." Rosalind didn't sound impressed by Bond's tactics. She thought the boy looked rather like a cat himself.

She leaned forward. 

"You know, when my mother was young, she was engaged to a man - another man, not my father - and was made to wait until after the war to marry him, to be intimate, to have children. Many young women in those days were in the same position. She argued, but to no avail.

He was a pilot in the RAF, handsome blighter. He never did come back, of course, the average life expectancy was less than 60 days I think, and he was shot down over France three weeks after his first sortie. 

She, my mother that is, never got over it, I don't think, not really. She knew the odds were against them, but that made it all the more important that they got to be together, to be official, to have what little time they might get. She had to move on eventually and don't get me wrong, she genuinely loved my father - they met a few years after the war when she was working for the Ministry of Trade, and of course I have to be glad because I was born; but she never got over Leonard. She once told me that he came to her in her dreams, looking so sad...she had nothing of him except a bracelet he bought her and a couple of photos.

"Anyway, all of this is ancient history but the point is, sometimes older people can be wrong, and only the young know how important it is to seize happiness, even if shortlived."

Q took her hand. 

"He - James - my -he - his job, it's very dangerous. He's cheated the odds too many times to count. But I know that his luck can't last forever, unless he reconciles himself one day to retiring from - what it is he currently does.

"Do you think I should threaten to leave? I don't know how he would react to that. People generally don't try to manipulate him, or if they do, they find it doesn't end well."

Rosalind twinkled at him. 

"I don't think you need to manipulate him. Just remind him that lives that have a lower expected span might justify flexibility in judging what is appropriate or ideal." 

"No seduction then, just reasoned argument?"

"Oh I wouldn't say that, exactly. I think that might be called for as well. 

"Now, would you like a mint imperial for your ears? These tunnels do make one's hearing go pop!"

...........

He helped Rosalind with her bags at Paddington, having only a small case himself, and saw her into her local service to Ealing, where her daughter lived. 

Then, he steadied his nerves with a coffee and rather doughy croissant, before nervously making his way towards Bond's flat. 

He shouldn't really feel nervous. James was still in Albania, according to his latest information. He went via Moneypenny's office, to be given a key to Bond's flat. She wasn't there, she and M were in some tedious meeting with ministers; but she'd left an envelope on the desk with detailed instructions as to how to get into the fortress that was James' home.

..........

Walking into the flat felt eerie. Like home but so, so strange too. The beauty of it soothed him and pleased, yet the lingering traces of its absent owner both tantalised and terrified him. There was cologne by the sink in the bathroom, discarded ties slung over the handlebars of a cross trainer in the small gym off the dressing room, and when Q ventured into Bond's bedroom, he picked up a pillow, and though washed, he was sure he could smell James there. The scent was intoxicating, drunk making. His heart thudded at the thrill of being able to be here, to explore, and James not to know. Of course, his aim was for this to be his room too, but there was no guarantee on that front, so Q was making the most of not being under scrutiny. 

He kicked off his shoes and lay down on the bed. Far below, he could hear slight traffic noise, and the rumble soothed him. It had been a long day, and his leg ached. He started thinking about a maths problem he'd been wrestling with. Before long, his eyes dropped, and his body curled into a foetal curl. Then, he slept. 

.............

He woke, hours later, to darkness and the sensation of no longer being alone.


	14. News

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q finds out who is in the flat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep so this is one of those huge let downs, a short chapter. I'm sorry!!! But I wanted to post it as reassurance that I'm on the case and writing, and there will be a proper length chapter in a couple of days max in which Q and Bond are reunited. 
> 
> Hope this small nosegay will suffice for today! Tea Xx

The figure in the darkness was just a vague outline to Q, without his glasses he was practically blind. As the figure got close enough to reach over and place his glasses gently into his hand, Q smelled the scent. Eve Moneypenny. 

It took a few more moments of putting his glasses on, and wakening himself properly, for his brain to make the connections as to why Eve might be visiting him in the early hours.

He tried to make a feeble joke, but then, all of his jokes were feeble. There'd never been anyone to listen to them, or at least, no one who would smile and be encouraging. 

"If you've come to seduce me I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you?"

Eve didn't smile. Normally, Eve would definitely have smiled at him, with him. Instead, Eve sat on the bed, and took his thin hand in hers. She had pale pink nail varnish. It suited her, he thought.

"Q, it's Bond. We lost comms with him last night and have only just tracked him down. We got him out, but things were quite ugly at the end, and he's hurt. We're bringing him straight into Medical as soon as the jet lands at Northolt. Latest sitrep is that they managed to reinflate his part collapsed lung, but are concerned about whether they've managed to identify all loci of the internal bleeding. Plus he has a broken left arm, a bullet in his shoulder and various penetrating stab wounds. He's unconscious currently, not particularly stable and...well. It's not procedure, not at all, but I came to get you. There isn't really anyone else, he doesn't have his own people, and the only one was M - the last M - she would have been a someone for him, but she's gone so..."

Q was already throwing off his old clothes and dressing in fresh ones, heedless of propriety. Eve watched, stunned at how thin he was, his body seeming like a slender reed. She wasn't sure how he supported himself, but he was like a possessed creature now, flinging all sorts of bits of 007's clothing into a small case, muttering to himself, running his hands through his wild bird's nest of hair.

It suddenly occurred to Eve that this was James' bedroom, not Q's. She murmured that she'd let him get ready, and retreated to the kitchen. She'd seen a single silent tear streak his cheek and had no wish to humiliate him by being a witness to his misery. Plus, she knew from her file that however firm a friend she and Q were, and they were, nobody could assume that they could touch Q without consequence for the young man's equilibrium, physical and mental. Except perhaps, 007. 

Unlikely as it might seem, the most unlikely, the widest of all possible odds, James Bond appeared to have become the key to Q's future happiness. Moneypenny just hoped James recovered better and quicker than predicted, and that he didn't let Q down.

.........

The Medical section at M16 was well used to handling Bond in all kinds of shape and his file was as thick as his biceps. He was in theatre within minutes of his arrival, and neither Q nor Eve were allowed to see him, due to his unstable condition. 

Q looked terrible now. The dark shadows that characterised his face were now sunken and deeper, almost black. His hair was sticking up in clumps, where he would pull at it as he implored Eve to go and ask yet again about any update. He was wearing sweat pants and a raggy T shirt with a cat cartoon on it, no socks amd dirty white Vans. She could tell that he'd not only taken up smoking recently, but was struggling with waiting in here where he wasn't permitted to smoke? 

He broke into her thoughts.

"I met a woman on the train. An old woman. She talked to me, and she said that if you don't expect to live long, you should be allowed to act more impulsively, do things you wouldn't otherwise. So that you know. So that you don't have to die not knowing."

"Wow." Eve was intrigued and slightly disturbed by Q's ability to have these intensely deep conversations with a total random stranger. "Do you think that has relevance to you and Bond?"

Q nodded, vigorously, and his glasses glinted in the harsh overhead strip lights.

"I do. And I need to tell James that. I need to make him understand that."

Eve slipped her hand gently under his elbow, in what she hoped was a non threatening physical contact. 

"You'll get to tell him. I just hope for your sake and his that he listens."


	15. Q goes from a floor to a bed and back to a floor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so the content gets rather more mature here, and prob explicit after that. About time too!

Being a technical nobody on the official priority list of Those who Were Permitted to See the Agent Once Awake, Eve could only do so much for Q. So much being not that much, because medical checks were followed by several hours intelligence debriefing, a barely conscious Bond having to divest himself of all knowledge gained in order to make the whole expedition, as M put it, "more than a bloody waste of time of a fishing expedition." 

Clearly, Bond even in his compromised and drowsy state had managed to satisfy the four serious looking gentlemen and two ladies who eventually departed. And then, at last, it was time for Q to have his turn, except that now he was told that Bond was very tired and he would only get fifteen minutes, after which James must be allowed to sleep. He looked helplessly at Moneypenny, but all she could do was make a sympathetic face, one that tried to encourage him to make the most of the time he had.

............

At first, when Q knocked and quietly entered the room, he thought Bond might actually already be asleep. His breathing was quiet and regular, his eyes were closed and he did not react to the sound, in contrast to his usual lightning fast instincts. Q moved closer, and as he did so, and his warm breath moved near to Bond, James opened his eyes, the dazzling blue like Ceylon sapphire, perfectly marquise cut. 

"Hallo." It was all Q could think of to say. The reality of seeing James again was something he expected to be overwhelming, but here, feet frozen to the floor, in his ridiculous clothes which he knew made him look about eight (and wasn't that a bloody mistake when Bond had qualms about age and age difference?), here, he was almost struck dumb.

Bond smiled.

"Hello, Q. I'm sorry I wasn't at the flat to greet you. I got a bit held up."

Q took his left hand, the scarred, weathered surface under the tan evidence of past missions. Hands that killed, saved, caressed. It was the alchemy of all those things that made Bond. That, and the rootless exuberance of an upperclass Scottish-Swiss orphan brought up in the very cream of English privilege.

"How do you feel."

"Better for having my lungs working passably well again. And for having that bullet dug out. The stab wounds are the fiercest. But all things shall pass, as the hippies say. Be back on mission before you know it."

Q nodded even though he'd be happier if Bond never saw another gun again, but only if Bond was reconciled to that, which he clearly wasn't.

"Do you know how long they will keep you here?" 

Bond laughed, and then winced. 

"Official version, a week minimum. Unofficially, I'll not last more than two days in here, long enough for me to get rid of all the tubes and leads. Once they're off, so am I. I'd do better at home."

"With...me? Will I be there?"

Bond looked at him curiously then.

"Of course with you there. Don't be silly. The flat is your home, just as it is mine? Why wouldn't you be there?"

Q shook his head, unable to explain. How could he say everything that he wanted to here, with James in this bed? 

James would have pressed the point but he was exhausted and his eyes were starting to droop alarmingly. 

Q slipped out.

.......

In the end it was five days before the medics would allow 007 to leave their clutches, and Q was grateful for Eve's tendency to mother-hen him. She arranged a regular food drop-off at the flat, and also for the company that laundered Bond's high class wardrobe to do something with Q's own lowly collection of trousers, shirts and sweaters. 

Bond and Q had little chance to talk while he was in Medical. A downside of being in hospital at your workplace, he supposed, there was always someone bloody there. Even when there wasn't, Q couldn't bring himself to speak, and the longer that went on, the more impossible it became. He felt like James was treating him as something like a house-pet, and while he knew there was nothing alpha male about him, he didn't like being treated as though he had no physical presence, no sexual signature.

So a frustrated Q and a tired and hence short tempered James Bond finally made it into the flat, and James headed straight to the sofa, spitting annoyance at only having the use of one arm. 

Q offered him a drink of tea or coffee. James requested a whisky. Large and peaty. Q refused on the basis of the medications, waving the bag at Bond nervously. James swore at Q and retreated to his bedroom, slamming the door and then crashing around before the flat went quiet. 

So that went well.

.........

Around midnight, Q, who had been perched biting his already bitten nails on the largest of the armchairs, hopped off the perch and knocked softly on Bond's door. There was no reply, so he quietly opened the door a little. 

Bond was sleeping. Q thought he looked a bit younger asleep, though no less dangerous. He was lying on his side, nude to the waist, just PJ bottoms, and Q watched his chest rise and fall, the movement hypnotising. He lay on his right side, his left arm encased in the plaster cast. Q wanted to touch him, but was aware that being here, with James asleep, wasn't the greatest etiquette, and that touching him might just get him garrotted with a single instant reaction from the agent, well before Q had a chance to explain himself.

But he couldn't leave and go to the sterile, lonely guest room. He couldn't be in the same flat as Bond, and not be able to hear the miracle of his breathing in and out. 

So Q took blankets from an ottoman at the end of the bed, and pillows, and made up a small nest on the floor at the foot of the bed. He'd have liked to be at the side, almost like sleeping next to James, but James might get up in the night and...garrotting again...so, the end of the bed it was. Hopefully he'd hear any movement this way. He undressed 

Now he was tucked up in bedclothes, close by his beloved 007, the boy slept, deep and peacefully. 

.........

It was around six am when James woke, the sun streaming in through the windows. They needed cleaning, he could see the streaks. 

He saw immediately that the lumpy bundle sticking out from the foot of the bed contained a small skinny lump known as Q, and his heart burned at the idea that the boy had been there on the floor all night, even after they had argued. 

Before he could change his mind, he got out of bed, uncovered the bundle, and woke Q. Green eyes, startled, blinked up at him. 

"I'm sorry, I know I was supposed to be in the gue..."

Bond placed a finger to his lips, and then to Q's own, and took his hand. He was freezing. Ridiculous child. He led him to the bed, and motioned for him to get in. 

Q looked uncertain. He didn't want to get in the bed only for James to go off and make breakfast. But, he climbed in. It was still warm from Bond's body and he wriggled a little, holding his breath. 

And James got into bed next to him.

Q almost squeaked out loud. He wished he could trust himself to keep it together and maintain respectable composure. 

"You're frozen, Q. Warm up."

With that, James' long iron strong arms surrounded him and he was drawn back into the curve of the agent's body, the feeling of pleasure and comfort at being the little spoon almost drowning him in sweetness. It was clear that Bond had nothing ulterior on his mind, but it was something and enough for now.

.........

James might have had completely respectable intentions when he took Q into his bed. They slept, chaste and cosy, for another three hours. 

Q woke just after eight, feeling safe and protected. He was aware, through, that there was an element of morning wood that he tended to get and so was thinking of maybe hitting the bathroom first. But as he woke, he became aware that his own moderate erection was as nothing compared with the hot hardness that was pressing against his own arse at the current moment, belonging to a deep sleeping secret agent.

Q couldn't decide if he liked the sensation or not - for about four seconds. Then, Bond moved slightly and It twitched and Q bit his lip because that, right there, was fucking devastating, and his own dick went from half hard to God Save the King in a few seconds. 

He thought for a moment. He could get out of bed, waking James in the process, and go and deal with his natural shame in private. Or, and this would be completely wrong, totally wrong, and very unacceptable, he could, perhaps, just touch for a moment, maybe even kiss it very very lightly, and perhaps Bond wouldn't wake but might swell and jump slightly in his hand or against his mouth. Perhaps he could have that, just that, and he would know, would have the memory of what it was like.

He carefully sat up and leaned his face down. At this distance he could smell James, his body, his cologne, the slight lingering smell of hospital. 

James had PJs with a simple open placket opening, no buttons, and the girth of his cock was generous and the length impressive. The head poked up, pushing the waistband which had ridden down a little during the night, away from his skin. Q held his breath, and gave a tiny lick to the crown, now revealed by the foreskin retracting. It was sensational. Not the taste, that was salty and just - well. - what it was - but the sensation of it, of doing this, blew Q's brain, and he hummed. 

It was the humming that woke Bond.

The next thing Q knew, he was on his back on the floor with a plaster cast pinning his neck down and a very nude, very aroused, very furious James Bond sitting on his stomach.


	16. Searching

Injury had always been an inconvenience for Bond, and never more so that now. By the time he had realised that it was Q who was providing personal services to him as he slept, and balanced himself enough to raise his weight back off the youth, the boy had fled, grabbing clothes and disappearing out of the door. 

"Shit. Shit SHIT!"

Bond rang Eve. Eve was angry, with him, not Q. 

"James. You have to sort this out. It's ridiculous."

"Moneypenny. Find him for me. Use whatever resources you need, just find him. He can't have gone far."

Eve was less positive.

"I'll do everything I can, but remember, this isn't someone like you or I. And it's not a dosser who is a creature of habit. Q is a feral, the hardest type to track down. His life has been so chaotic that there are no patterns, he has no roots, there is no one to pressure for information. Nobody cares about Q, except us, and Q doesn't even believe that right now."

Bond didn't want to hear all this. 

"This is just excuses. He has no money. He has no home. He will have to surface. He will!"

"Okay then, supposing he does? What will you do with him then?" 

Bond was confused. "What do you mean, what will I do? I'll bring him home to the flat?" 

"Do you think he will stay?"

"Why wouldn't he? It's warm and dry and there's food and every convenience."

Eve sighed and growled audibly. 

"He doesn't see you as the key to secure board and lodgings, James. Nor even as a friend who is kind enough to offer him a home. He is in love with you, properly, with an intensity that only the young have, and simply to house him and treat him kindly is not what Q wants from you. Now. Listen to me. Either make a decision that you are prepared to look past the age difference and try a proper adult relationship with that poor boy, or else decide that you are not, and if you are not, then please do not ask me to look for him because to be honest, I think he is better off free of your influence in his life. He doesn't need a sugar daddy, or want one, he wants a lover. Why it should fall to me to explain this is quite beyond me but well...."

James groaned.

"What will you do, Eve?"

"I will try to find him. If I find him and he's in real trouble, I'll scoop him up, but only if he wants to be rescued. He needs to have autonomy, he's been treated like a pet for too long. And meanwhile, you can decide what you actually want, which I know is a novel thing for you to have to do. Normally your partners take whatever crumbs they are offered from your table, but he's different, James. He won't stay where he's not wanted, he's had too much of that feeling already in his life."

James said his goodbyes without commenting further, and clicked to end the call. 

.............

For nineteen days and nights there was absolutely no sign of Q.

Bond, for the first few of these days, was "very difficult to work with". He was out all night scouring the streets of the capital, concentrating on all haunts Q had told him about. By daytime, more of the same, but mixed with long periods of making life absolute hell for those unfortunate enough to have been assigned to find Q, who by this time had been exposed to enough secret information to make him officially an asset, if a relatively loosely defined one.

After four days, matters came to a head, when an unwise remark from one of the older guard about Bond's "unhealthy focus on such a young man" led to the middle ranking office worker requiring a matching cast to Bond's own, and Bond himself up before M in a formal disciplinary interview. Bond was glad of his own cast now, only that was keeping him from being shipped out and dumped in the shittiest assignment Gareth Mallory could find (and there were always lots of those kind to choose from). 

Mallory didn't have Eve's soft spot for Bond, nor her affection for Q. He saw the whole thing as a straightforward asset retrieval. So, Bond escaped having his wings clipped, but only because Mallory needed Q back. He did however record a written warning on Bond's file, to the effect that further intentional violence towards anyone not directly threatening the safety of an SIS asset (including Q), or intelligence sought by the SIS, would result in immediate suspension, removal of "00" status and potentially summary dismissal from the Service.

............

That night, Bond was back out on the streets, searching and getting nowhere. It was like Q was only a shadow, some kind of apparition. Had he even been real? James had to slap himself more than once to remind himself that Q had been not just real, but beautiful and in his bed. And what a fucking mess he'd made of that particular opportunity.

Bond had always known he wasn't a good man, but with Q he'd tried to behave in the way he thought a good man did. Now, he was beginning to wonder whether his model of goodness had been simplistic. Maybe even a bit patronising? Unused to such soul searching, he sought out Moneypenny, perhaps the only member of staff with whom he still on good terms, and who he knew he could trust.

She confirmed his fears.

"Q is nearly nineteen, way over the legal age of consent. He's very mature for his age, and although he lacks breadth of experience, he seems to me to be more than capable of deciding that he wants a sexual and romantic relationship. Of course, you are completely entitled to decide that you don't feel that's ok for you, but you can't in all fairness then demand the sort of influence and closeness to him that you have been these past months."

Bond sat in a tiny railway arches all night cafe in deepest New Cross later that evening, thinking about her words. 

What really got to him was not only the realisation of how selfish his supposed altruism had been from Q's point of view, but also how bitterly he regretted making Q feel scared and ashamed of his actions on the day he vanished. And all the time, at the back of Bond's mind, was the knowledge that it is not possible to live in the London of the twenty first century with no home and no money. It probably never had been, of course, but especially now.

.................

Those darkling thoughts came back to James when he sat in a conference room at Vauxhall Cross, reviewing the status of the search at the fourteen day checkpoint. He answered questions as they were put to him. No. He did not have any more information about Q (note : neither did anyone else in the room). No. He did not think they should move the case to Watch status (a.k.a. Give up for now and wait until a body washes up somewhere). No. He did not want to involve mediums and spirit guides to lead them to Q. 

It was indicative of his current state that he treated the last as seriously as the rest of the questions, and it was only when the room fell silent that he spoke in more than monosyllables. Eve was glad to see him speak. She hadn't seen him looking this lost since Vesper, and actually, that had been grief and anger combined, which could be empowering. This was grief and guilt, which tended to paralyse. 

"I think we need to look at the money angle. He had none with him, and what paltry bank accounts he had haven't been touched. He's got to be getting cash from somewhere."

Someone, Bond didn't look up to see who, which was lucky for them, piped up.

"Assuming he's still alive."

The look they got from Eve left them in no doubt of the wisdom of keeping their mouth firmly shut from now on and for the rest of the day.

James ignored the interjection, and continued.

"I want every gay sauna, massage parlour and brothel within the M25 ring to be looked at. Start central. Ask about new boys, skinny white new boys. He'll be a valuable commodity, looking...like he does."

The words burned his throat as he uttered them, like bile. But he knew he was right. What would a boy who was told that his affections were unwelcome and wrong do, but go and prove it otherwise? Besides, he'd be a rubbish thief, and he'd need a settled base to set up in the hacking again. Selling himself would be the easiest - and the hardest - solution.

It was a tall order to check every establishment, but James had a feeling that Q wasn't far away, staying close in Bond's shadow at every step. 

Five days later, Bond was proved right on every count.


	17. The lost boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about all the angst, though anyone who has read my Sherlock fics will know I'm an angst-whore to the core...this is relatively light and fluffy in comparison!

Q was tired. Not the sort of tired you were when you've stayed up all night trying to get into the North Korean nuclear programme software, nor the tired you were when you played computer games all night to forget about the rubbish going on in real life. Now, Q was tired inside himself, in his bones, in his mind, in every step he took inside the knocking shop he'd ended up in when the guy who'd seemed like a white knight taking him in turned out to be a bit grubbier than he'd first appeared.

So far, Q had earned his keep with his mouth. Apparently that wasn't enough to pay for his board and lodgings, such as they were, but being a virgin made him worth more, and Mikkael was wanting top money for him. So, in the meantime he was earning cold burgers and cereal with not fresh enough milk by giving blow jobs to strangers, amateurish, choking, unbearable cocksucking. He couldn't leave the house. He didn't even have a proper bed, just a foam chair that folded out. His knees were sore, his throat was sore and his soul was empty and aching. He didn't eat the burgers and he didn't eat the cereal. He was existing on Red Bull and pro plus and fizzy drinks. 

Q just wanted it to be over, whatever that would mean. The wave of hope and positivity that had swept over him with Bond, Oxford, the flat, SIS, all of that, had receded like a tide, over the horizon and out of sight. He regretted running away now. Humiliation and fear didn't make for great decision making, he recognised. But it was too late. He still had the taste of the last man in his mouth, and in a few minutes there would be another to take his place. And soon, very soon, there would be someone who would pay enough to please Mikkael and then all he could see ahead was grey fog stretching away into the distance. 

The door buzzer went. Q nervously played with his hair. The girl would bring the man up. 

He saw two more clients that evening, before a final last minute one. This guy had offered Mikkael a lot of cash, had heard they had someone new, but needed a lot of convincing that Q was still unspoiled. In the end, they settled on four hundred pounds. Q could hear the figure as they agreed it. Apart from that raised voice moment, he heard only low muffled conversation. 

He closed his eyes, knowing this was the end, now. 

...........

When he opened them again, James Bond was standing in the doorway, looking haggard and exhausted. Q closed his eyes again, convinced this was a cruel trick, but opening them a second later, the reality hadn't shifted, except that James was now kneeling beside him and those scarred and calloused hands were expertly running over him, checking for injury, making sure his pulse was normal. Only when James came close to his face did Q turn away, and he knew that Bond was all too aware of his reasons. James became grim faced, despite his famed skill at a poker face, as he caught the faInt odour of stale semen on Q's breath. 

He didn't seem as angry as Q had supposed though. Not that he spoke much to Q, he was too busy bustling him downstairs and out of the so called massage parlour, and having a less than polite conversation with the proprietor. Q didn't argue, or object, just let himself be dressed by a blank faced official in a track suit, and then allowed himself to be bundled into a large black car. 

James followed some minutes later. He'd clearly secured a full refund, as the £400 was going back in his wallet as he got into the car. He didn't speak to Q except to ask if he was warm enough, and to fuss slightly with the woollen blanket round Q's shoulders. His gaze was cold, flinty, but his touch was gentle. A good job. Q was as jumpy as a gazelle, fearful of touch and taut as a bow, aided by the caffeine overdose.

It was a short drive to Bond's flat, and as they got out, Bond wished the official goodnight, and that he would see them in a week. Q wondered if he was going on a mission? He trailed after James, dreading the confrontation to come. He felt sordid and unclean. Thought about running too, but based on where it'd got him last time. 

.............

The lights were dim in the flat, and Bond indicated to Q that he should sit on the sofa. Bond then disappeared into the kitchen for a few minutes, and Q wasn't sure what he was doing in there. He picked up a magazine, but by the time James came back in the room, he looked down and found that he had torn the cover into a multitude of tiny pieces. He tried to scoop them up. Some of them escaped and fell onto the floor. That demonstration of his inability to control even the smallest thing, or to behave appropriately, was his undoing. Q started to cry quietly. 

Bond had been making sandwiches, conscious that Q was looking starved. He set the tray down, sat down next to Q on the sofa, and drew the boy into his arms. His shirt quickly darkened with the salty tears and all he could hear were muffled gulps and wracking sobs. Q was coughing too. 

Q didn't want to look at him, for fear of breathing on him or seeing the look in his eyes. 

"Look at me. Q, look at me."

Dark eyes peeped out of under a heavy fringe. 

"Right now, you are going to eat this sandwich. Then, you are going to go and have a long bath. And then you are going to eat another sandwich, and then, only then, will we talk. Please don't think anything that you tell me will shock me, or disgust me, or make me send you away or reject you. I have done many, many unpleasant things in my career, sometimes for my life, sometimes for secrets, and sometimes for food. You were hungry. You did what you had to. Be brave, get clean and some food inside you."

Q was on the verge of more tears, but bit his lip, nodded, ate the sandwich and then shuffled off to the bathroom. Bond watched him go. Still too young, still too fragile, but James now felt that perhaps he was the lesser evil to Q flailing around in the outside world, ill-equipped as he was to navigate it. But he would give Q the choice.

................

It was a subdued Q that trailed back into the room. James had changed into jeans at T shirt, casual and hopefully unthreatening. Q was dressed in pyjamas and dressing gown now. They sat on the sofa. Bond poured tea. Q smelled a lot better, he noted.

Once they had their drinks, Bond sat back. 

"I want to apologise, Q. For scaring you and rejecting you that morning. It was unforgivable of me to invite you into my bed and then treat you so harshly. I'm sorry, truly sorry."

Q muttered something that James couldn't hear. James continued.

"Tell me, Q. About what happened. Only as much as you feel able to talk about about, but as much as you can." 

So Q told him, about the nights sleeping rough, getting soaking wet because he was clueless about the good places to sleep and when he did find one he'd be hounded out or have a knife pulled on him. How Mikkael had seen him outside a McDonald's looking hungry, and had told him he could find him work, and give him a roof over his head. How like a fool he'd gone with him, but then he was locked up and told he had to be nice to the visiting clients in exchange for food. Suck them and fuck them, or rather, in his case suck them and be fucked by them. When he protested that he couldn't be fucked, that he'd never - well, he'd thought that would mean they wouldn't want to, but Mikkael got very animated then and said they would get more money. 

How he almost passed out on the first client, and how the taste never left him and the smell never went away, and he couldn't eat because his throat was so sore and he knew he would choke on the food.

How he was going to either escape the client chosen to deflower him, or kill him, rather than be subject to that fate. 

Q seemed hollow once he'd finished talking. James took a moment to drink some of his tea. 

"There's a poem, Q, about there being two paths in a forest. I'm offering your that choice of two paths. 

"You can go back to Oxford, be a student. Do silly student things and get a firm academic base and qualifications, and then come and work for M16. Be with kids your own age, and be carefree. You'd have money, independence, whatever. No strings. 

"Or, you can stay here. With me. Properly, as...together. Like you wanted. If you still wanted. I'm no great prize, tho some have been fooled into thinking it. I'm too old for active service really, I have a truly terrible track record with relationships and my body is so shot up that I'll probably be a cripple ten years after I hand in the Walther."

Q shook his head.

"But...you don't want me. You think of me as just a kid, a drag, someone you are responsible for. Why would you tease me like this?"

James stopped him from continuing. He pulled Q up from the sofa. Pulled him against his lean frame. Let Q feel exactly how un-paternal his feelings were for him. Q closed his eyes as the hardness pressed against his stomach. His long dark eyelashes fluttered, and then he opened his eyes again. 

"Not a tease, Q. Never that."


	18. If at first...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q and Bond have a go at sexytimes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note I've changed the rating to explicit because of Rude.

Q felt like a young colt in Bond's arms. His desperation to show Bond the depth and seriousness of his ardour made for clumsy, frantic kissing and clawing at James' back, and he seemed to be all arms and legs and lips. Bond, slightly to his embarrassment, found it a massive turn-on. He wondered if he should do, but reminded himself that Q was of age and of sound mind. And then he thought, fuck it, I want this boy with me. For good, if he'll stay. And if he doesn't stay, because I get old and he's still young and I cramp his style, then I hope I'll have the style and the grace to let him go. 

For now, Q wasn't going anywhere except into Bond's bed. 

They tumbled, half-dressed from living room to bedroom, tripping over their semi-discarded garments. Bond was extra disadvantaged by his plaster cast, but Q still took longer to get to the bed and to get his clothes off, he was still wearing underpants when their bodies hit the sheets. 

Bond was totally nude and Q was able to take in the sight for the first time ever. He twisted his hands together nervously. James rolled over to him and gazed into Q's green eyes with his own bright blue ones. 

"You're worried. Tell me."

His voice was so kind and so deep that Q felt like bursting into tears with the sheer overwhelming sensations. 

"I - your body is amazing. I just, I haven't done this before, and I wasn't sure what to expect and you - you're not that much taller than me but there - he waved a hand around vaguely towards Bond's crotch - there, you're a lot - um - bigger. That's all. I want to and I'm just feeling a bit concerned about, well, how it might fit. Whether I can do that?"

James smiled at him. 

"I'm flattered by your compliments young man, but let's get one thing absolutely clear, my sweetest Q. We won't be doing anything in a hurry, we won't be doing anything without a lot of preparation, we don't have to do anything you don't want to, and we definitely won't be doing anything which involves you that you haven't done to me first."

This last part made Q shocked. He blinked.

"I didn't think you would - I thought you would want to have me. I want you to have me. I don't see it as anything less?"

"I haven't. Done that. Been fucked by another man. No. You would be the first, Q."

Bond was serious now, his smile gone, but the kindness remained in his expression and he stroked Q's cheek now. 

"You're right, it's not something I've ever sought. At least, not until now. But I want it now. I want to know what it feels like, taking someone's cock, I think it will make me a better lover for you when we switch. And yes, I am pretty sure that I'm a dyed in the wool top, so I'm happy when you say you feel as though you are comfortable taking the bottom role. But you haven't tried it yet, so if you do and it's awful, you can change your mind. We can negotiate different ways of having sex, switch, maybe even non penetration. The important thing is that you are safe, happy and I get you to myself. Okay?"

Q looked relieved but frowned.

"Why are you being like this? All the gossip I heard around Six was that you were a one night stand man, except obviously for Vesper. That you had worked your way around the worlds most beautiful women but, with that single exception, rarely did so twice. That you were great in bed but cool to the point of being cold in the light of day? Cruel? A player? A user?" 

James nuzzled into his bony shoulder. 

"Why do you think, Q? It's different. You are different. We could be different. I know I made you angry holding you at arm's length but that was a reflection of the stakes being much higher. I'm tired and fucked up and need someone to lean on, someone to come home to. I've never wanted that before. And no, apart from a little youthful experimentation, I've never craved someone of the same sex before."

Q pushed himself up, propping himself on his left forearm. He found it hard to take it all in, the idea that Bond might see him as special. They hadn't even been to bed. It just didn't fit with everything he'd been told. Yet James seemed deadly serious. 

James took that opportunity to lean forward and kiss Q on the lips, sweet and slow.

...........

An hour and a half later, Bond was smoking in bed and rueing his totally fucking ability to learn from past mistakes. Like, that he should do what he felt, and not what he felt was the right thing to do. He'd fallen into that trap a second time with Q. 

Q was sitting naked on the edge of the bed, pretending he wasn't crying. He was crying, though. He knew that James could hear him and he'd thought about shutting himself in the bathroom, but he knew that doing so could sever the silken thread between them for good. He was crying about that, and about the shame he felt at his failure.

Prep had all gone fine, Bond had taken responsibility for opening himself up, and had paid plenty of attention to Q's body and his sweet prick, and by the time James was as ready as he'd ever be, Q was as hard as could be. They'd decided that they'd do this face to face, Q didn't need any impersonal sex experiences after that photographer. 

As Q's cock head brushed slickly against James's hole, he looked up at Q's face and saw nothing except sick terror. A moment later, Q was trying to push, trying to breach James, but the harder he battled, the softer his cock became. In the end, James had to stop him from trying, because he was getting sore, and Q's prick was as flaccid as wet fish.

He reassured Q. They tried a second time, and a third. 

Then,they stopped, because Q was...not able to be easily consoled. And James's arse felt like a castle door, having been assailed by a battering ram. Not a feeling he was used to, or wished to repeat.

.........

He wouldn't talk about it, so Bond was talking instead. It was so much noise coming out of his mouth, reassuring noise, and he could tell Q wasn't listening. 

He wondered how to snap Q out of it. 

Throw of the dice time. Nothing left to lose. 

........

Q felt nothing until a hand covered his eyes and brushed his eyelids closed. Then he heard James' voice.

"I'm sorry Q. I should have been looking after you instead of the other way round. Please forgive me for being crap. Can I do that now - look after you?"

The words and the darkness behind his eyelids brought instant relief from the pressure to perform. Q nodded, wiping the stinging tears from his cheeks. 

"Lie down for me, can you? Like in bed. Perfect."

James looked down at the blotchy tear stained face and the perfect slight frame beneath him. The slight outline of ribs and the bony hips. The smooth oval nipples, peaking now a little. The dark hair, usually carefully arranged over his low brow but now haphazard, askew, riotous. The quiet, unassuming penis, seemingly unaware of its situation. A small trail of hair, looking oddly out of place in the slim boyish frame. His balls, too, almost looked out of place. This man-boy, beautiful and ashamed.

The encounter may have been a disaster so far, but he felt that the magic was still there to be unlocked.


	19. Floreat Q

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sexytimes start!

"Red. Red means stop. Orange means slow down. Green means keep doing what you're doing, and maybe do it some more or faster."

James was staring intently at Q, and even though his eyes were still tightly closed, Q nodded vigorously. 

"All right. First. First you get to feel good, okay? Like it should feel. Like it will always feel, if it's me and you."

Another nod, accompanied now by a slight firming of that sweet slim cock.

Bond leaned lazily over and took a small bottle massage oil from his bedside cabinet drawer, leaving the drawer open a little. There were other things he would need, later. 

The oil was slick and smooth and its expense was evident in its heady scent. It was the sort of fragrance that Q, a martyr to hay fever, would normally run a mile from. But here, with Bond, the notes of woodiness and muskiness only made him breathe it in deeply. Then he squirmed a little, as Bond's rough hands touched his shoulders. 

"Have you ever had a massage?" James looked curious.

"No, and I think I'm ticklish, just a bit." 

"Excellent. I'm sure you'll tell me when I hit the no-way too ticklish spots, and I can learn where is ok."

None of Q's fallibilities seemed to put James off his stride. His hands were warm now, smooth against Q's skin, and the steady stroking of his arms and hands had progressed into performing the same service for his legs and feet. Bond avoided his groin, though that didn't stop Q getting slowly harder as each stroke massaged his muscles and skin.

Inevitably, attention eventually turned towards his torso. Of all his body elements, this was the one that Q felt shamed him the most. He felt like a scrawny feral cat, all ribs and concave where there should be muscles and smooth skin. He knew that people liked his face, and admired his low browed thick shock of shining dark hair. But the rest of him, he felt, was a sad let down in comparison.

He was bemused that one of the most famed lovers in the Western World clearly felt differently. Massage is an intimate business and when the masseur is naked and the subject only wearing pants, there's little room for modesty. As Bond explored his neck and chest with his hands, Q peeked from under his usefully covert long eyelashes, and realised that James was rock hard.

"I did that to him?" It hardly seemed credible. But he couldn't argue with the evidence.

Bond was too clever for him, knew he'd been looking. He reached over and grabbed a t shirt and put it over Q's eyes. 

"You don't need to keep it there, you can take it away at any time, but it's probably most effective if you either keep it on or take it off altogether. Sneaky peeks just lessen sensation, in my experience."

Q reflected that Bond had an awful lot of experience, and snuggled back down flat, with the T shirt over his eyes, for now at least. 

.............

By the time James had worked his way past Q's nipples, transforming them from flat, almost tattooed patterns into hard peaks of arousal, oil slick and saliva covered, Q was virtually silent, apart from occasional hisses. 

James's voice came as a shock, therefore. It sounded exceptionally deep, ridiculously so. 

"Q. I want to touch you in intimate areas now, to really make you feel good. Are you comfortable to remove your underwear for me?"

Q was nervous but not hesitant. His prick was considerably harder now, and he was more of a grower than a shower, so that helped. He didn't mind beIng smaller in everything, but he didn't want it to be by a huge margin. He pulled off his pants untidily, and lay back down. The air was warm, but felt cool against his cock for a moment. Then he felt oil being drizzled along his thighs, and began to squirm with arousal. 

Bond's calloused fingers were kneading at his flesh, working in the oil, the skin heated and blood pumping to his head. He stared through the white cotton weave of the T shirt, dim light filtering through, and as James reached his cock and smoothed the sweet oil over it, Q's mouth formed into a silent but expressive 'O'. He felt his hips gathering and himself, without his command, pushing up into Bond's fingers. 

...........

 

Bond's original intent was to bring Q to orgasm from the massage, and then to fuck him until he came again. Now, seeing the boy so abandoned, he changed his mind. He wanted Q to come first when he was already inside him, when he could feel Bond taking him, feel anyone taking him for the first time ever. And he was so young, maybe he could come again. Doubtful but it wouldn't matter. Fucking his beauty into the mattress, his hole loose, lube and his own pre come oiling his path, that would be exquisite. 

So Bond slackened off his ministrations, prompting a small sound of loss from Q. 

"I just wanted to ask you, Q. About why men and not women, for you?"

Q's breaths were still heavy and catchy, but after a moment, he spoke, his voice muffled a little. 

"I'm not what women, girls want. They think I'm cute and sweet. I find them strange, sinister almost. I feel like they will call me out, expose me for not being a real man, maybe suggest that I'm neither man nor woman."

James furrowed his brow.

"Why on earth would they think that? You're clearly in possession of perfectly standard equipment? (Equipment which was rapidly deflating thanks to this conversation)."

James looked at Q who was trembling and looked as though he might cry. 

"Is that something that you've thought yourself? That because you're slim and don't bulk up in the same way as me and the other 00 agents, that somehow you're not actually a man? Because that's bullshit, Q. Complete bullshit. It doesn't matter what your body looks like, about your sexuality. It doesn't even matter if you did have a vagina and not a cock. You know you are a man, and if you identify as one, then that is exactly what you are. As long as you want to be."

"I do want. I do identify. I - I just felt kind of inadequate next to what I saw as "proper" men, men's men. All ripped physique and beer and shouting. I've never been interested in beer or shouting."  
Q was curled up now, talking calmly but gravely.

Bond brought his body close but not touching. The smell of the massage oil was heady in his nostrils. 

"Some men are handsome, and a few, a very tiny proportion, are truly beautiful. Maybe you're right about women, but maybe they're just uncomfortable not knowing where to place you. Or jealous of your beauty, and attractiveness to men? Because you are very beautiful and you are very very attractive to men. Believe me. I've seen the way people look at you, you're oblivious because you have your own narrative but if you opened your eyes you would see it too."

Q snuffled slightly and nodded.

"I think this got way deeper than I thought it would."

Bond smiled and stroked his hair, his amazing unfeasibly mop.

"I think I know a way to take your mind off it, and maybe blow your mind altogether."

Q smiled back now. A watery smile, but it was there.

"Well, that sounds intriguing. My expectations are sky high now, Bond."

"Mmmm. I hope I won't disappoint...."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If the dialogue about sexual identity seems slightly vague and confused on Q's part, that's because he is! For Bond's part, he's never been hung up about who has what and who identifies as what, unless there's an impact on mission success....


	20. The lovers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The summary of this chapter is as follows: one great big sex scene. (You're welcome) 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, obviously explicit man on man sex explicitness. Hurrah. But I've tried to make it realistic given it's Q's first time. I hope you enjoy!

Despite its deflationary effect on genitalia, it felt good to have had the discussion about sexuality. Bond was reassured that Q wasn't acting solely out of reaction to rejection by girls, and that whilst he had some equivocal feelings about his own masculinity, they were well understood and articulated. In other words, Q was probably no more mixed up than any other teenager who had been through a particularly hard childhood.

For Q, it felt amazing. He'd never shared this, any of this, level of intimate detail with anyone, and sharing it now made him realise just how terribly lonely he had been, not just recently but for years. 

He knew that, not deliberately, but maybe without conscious intent, he might be seeing in Bond a fusion of a lover and a father figure, but in his own analysis, he both recognised it and also rejected the idea that there was anything fundamentally wrong in it. 

For both men, now felt like the first proper day of spring after a long winter. Bond felt younger than he had in years, and Q felt grounded, safe, and to be frank, worshipped.

............

Reverence in this case came in the form of passionate, almost frantic kissing, with Bond very much in control. Q, assailed by this near legendary lover, emerged some minutes later with lips bruised and swollen cherry-red, deep marks staining his pale swan neck, and breathless as if he'd run up flights and flights of stairs. 

Bond wasn't unaffected. His face remained unmarked, it's true, but the spark between him and Q was powerful and as soon as they had started to kiss, and he smelled the warmth of Q's oil slicked, flawless skin, he knew that this time, perhaps even more than with Vesper, he was in bloody deep. The only clues that betrayed it were a tiny vein on his temple which was pulsing away a million to the dozen, and the fact that his eyes, normally pale to mid blue, were dark and blazing with intent, their tone like the stormy sea. 

James quickly realised two things, as he started to work his way down that impossible body. Both were, he suspected, revelations to Q as well. Firstly, that Q clearly hadn't known that he had an exceptionally sensitive right nipple, which Bond found very, very pleasing. The second, which 007 only realised when he muttered something under his breath, was that Q really really liked dirty talk, and most of all, liked dirty talk where Bond was ordering him around.

Which was altogether fine by James Bond. 

"Do you know what I'm going to do to you, my darling Q? I'm going to put my fingers in you and see how many you can take, and then when you are desperate, I'm going to fuck you so hard that you see stars."

Q swallowed hard, and made a strangled sort of hum, squirming delightfully underneath Bond's touch, which was now stroking down the inside of Q's slim creamy white thighs. Bond had once seen a house proud man in Switzerland trimming his lawn grass with a pair of household scissors. The effect produced was not dissimilar (although obviously a lot more green) to that of Q's groin. In contrast to the wildness of his luxuriant hair, his pubic areas was close trimmed, orderly, well-behaved. Bond If he was being completely honest, liked the extremis of no hair or all full and natural. Not that this was a turn off, he just didn't want Q to think he needed to keep things tidy in the garden. And not that he would ever say it, unless Q asked him if he had a preference. His own hair was untamed and untrimmed. Both of them were uncut, in common with the vast majority of Brits.

Now, he started to concentrate. Q's demeanour was so much happier and calmer this way, and he regretted having put textbook manners above his instincts when he'd pushed Q to try topping. It was now very clear that he was a lot more comfortable in the opposite role, if only for now.

..........

James was kissing Q, and his hand was sliding along his cock, gently massaging and thumbing across the head, producing a surprisingly impressive pulse of pre come. Then, his other hand was moving back, just lightly brushing his entrance. He thought the boy might jump away, but instead Q groaned and pulled Bond closer still to his body. It was delighting James, this juxtaposition of extreme shyness and unashamed enjoyment. 

He reached for the lube, and coated the fingers of both hands. He knew that his next actions might well depress Q's arousal, so as his first finger circled Q's entrance, he started to move more meaningfully on Q's cock, and still more so as the finger dipped gently in. 

Q was tight, really tight. Bond had never slept with a male virgin before, and didn't make a habit of it with females, since most of his conquests were women who either belonged to someone else, or were very much setting their own agenda in all areas. Few of them were fragile, innocent, and none of them had ever looked him with such stricken wonder and amazement mixed with an amount of discomfort as Q was now.

Bond was taking more care than he'd ever done, but he wondered if it would be enough. His first finger was accepted, after some minutes, but Q was sweating and seemed just a little distracted. 

"We can stop. We can build up to it. Or not. Whatever's good. You tell me, Q?"

Q gritted his teeth.

"I - no - I want to go on. I know it will get better, just this first time it's - a lot - just go slowly, I know you are, just keep slow."

James nodded, and leaned down to kiss Q on his prick, which jumped visibly at his contact. So he took it in his mouth and sucked and hummed for a while, which made Q relax and while he did that, his second finger was able to join the first, slowly and as gently as he could. There was a moment when Q winced and Bond thought it was all over but Q nodded at him and James worked on loosening him enough for a third finger. 

Once three fingers were inside, scissored, James stopped wanking Q long enough to tell him that he was going to locate his prostate. Q clearly only had a vague idea of the organ's secondary benefit as he almost hit the ceiling when Bond pressed on the tiny mass. 

"Oh my God."

"Oh my Q, you are so delightful." 

"That was amazing. Maybe don't do that again until - later on, when you're..."

Q broke off. 

"When I'm what, Q? Deep inside you, making you forget everything until this moment? Coming inside you? Staying in you until you are so sensitive you can't bear me to pull out and can't bear me to stay inside"

Q was bright red. 

"Yes. That. All that. Yes, please James." He coughed and choked a little.

"You ask so nicely, Q, how can I refuse." 

Bond reached across for the strip of condoms he always carried. They hadn't talked about protection, and he was regularly tested, and Q was a virgin, but he always suited up, and Q wasn't to know his clean status. He rolled on the sheath and Q looked slightly nervous again, staring at Bond's penis. It was pretty impressive, he knew, not ridiculous, but a properly proportioned cock. He'd never had any complaints and a lot of compliments.

He moved forward and took Q's spindly legs around his waist. 

"Are you alright? Sure you want this?"

Q looked slightly tearful, but smiled as he nodded.

"Yes! Yes I do."

With that assent, Bond pushed slowly in. 

There was nothing much, in theory different between having sex with any other man, and having sex with this scrawny faun-like creature. Except, it was somehow totally different in every way he could imagine. 

The body was different. Slim and graceful. The sounds were different, youthful sighs and exhales sounded nothing like the grunts and groans of the only men he'd had before. Most of all, though, was the trust that spoke to him from Q's eyes, and the vulnerability that made the trust such a profound thing.

It hurt, at first, he could tell. He went as slowly as he could, but there was no escaping the fact that he was big and Q was small, and it seemed like an aeon of tiny increments of movement before his cock was bottomed out and Q was fully flush against him. 

Neither of them moved, or breathed, or spoke. Impaled thus, Q was holding his own penis, absently stroking. Bond was damned if he'd move before Q was ready. 

When Q did at last seem to relax and tell Bond he could move, James took that to mean slowly. However, it seemed that his bed partner had other ideas. Q encourages him to quicken his thrusts, and with his hand now back on Q's prick, Bond didn't have to be told twice. He withdrew almost completely, and then slammed into Q's arse, repeating it over and over and over until James was unable to hold back a second longer. He looked into Q's eyes, and came as hard as he had for years, explosively surging into the condom and shouting loudly and profanely. 

As the waves subsided and he became aware of his surroundings once more, he heard Q moan desperately and a small hand covered his own on Q's cock. Three pumps later was all it took, and Q came, ejaculating what seemed like endless creamy pulses of semen over his stomach and both their hands. 

James groaned deeply and withdrew, carefully holding the filled condom, and Q whimpered as he vacated, clearly feeling a lot of soreness now, despite James's efforts.

Having tied the condom and put it in the bin, James lay back next to the supine boy. He wasn't really sure what to say. He felt a little guilty, at taking anyone's virginity, as he didn't think he was an especially good man, nor a good bet for a long term relationship. The sex had been amazing for him, but he didn't know if Q felt the same. 

Next to him, Q was silent. Bond knew it was himself who would have to start dialogue. 

"Are you ok? How are you feeling, about everything. It was beautiful, for me. Did you enjoy it? I know you must be sore now."

Q frowned.

"I don't know how I can answer all those questions at once? It was lovely, and enjoyable mostly, except for the soreness. I did enjoy it, because it was with you."

That wasn't really unequivocal, but James knew Q was very logical and analytical. So he nodded and fetched warm flannels to wipe Q clean, and once that was done, he gathered up Q and spooned around him, protective and warm. Soon, he could hear q's breathing pattern change, and knew he was sleeping, exhausted and sated. 

......

But Bond, by contrast, lay awake far into that night, thoughts scudding across his consciousness for hours. Chief among them, the fear that he might be bad for Q, might break his heart? He was an old agent now, relatively, and had always been impetuous. And everyone knew that there were old agents and bold agents, but there were never any old, bold agents, at least, not for very long. 

What would become of Q, then?


	21. The morning after...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After their heady night of passion...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the short delay in this chapter. Easter intervened and since my fic writing is known only unto me, it had to wait! 
> 
> This is quite short but I have the outline of the next chapter and all the family have gone away now so I should be able to get it out in a few days! Yay! Hope you like this one!

It was Bond who woke, in the still early hours. Dawn was just beginning to intimate that it might deign to appear, but the darkness was still mostly inky and enveloping. It was an unusual sensation, waking next to another body. Generally, Bond preferred to leave under cover of darkness, if he had tarried even that long. Mostly, he fucked and fled. 

The strange being next to him in the bed was naked, lying on his back, with the covers thrown back. Bond remember how cold that bedsit room had been, and that the boy must be used to a lower temperature. But then he gazed over that body, and that damnable wave of instinct crashed over him again. Protection of its fragility. Desire for its mysteries. And a third sensation, something he could only remember feeling as a tiny boy, before the plane crash claimed the lives of both his parents. For a few moments he let the feeling roll over him, savouring it, trying to place it, but he couldn't quite identify it.

He felt very, very responsible for Q's future, that was for sure. Not only because he had taken his virginity last night, but also because Q clearly trusted him. 

Well. He hadn't fled yet, that was a new thing for him. 

He rubbed his face. Shower. Breakfast. Maybe a fleeting visit to the office. He was supposed to be on leave but he wanted to sort out Q's future. 

............

By the time Q started to stir, Bond was showered and dressed, and busy frying what looked like a traditional Scottish breakfast, which was like a full English except the sausage was a weird square and there was black and white and haggis pudding. 

Oops.

James put his head around the door, having heard Q stir, to ask what he would like to drink with breakfast. He caught firstly a massive wince as Q went to rise from the bed, and secondly a frown. 

"Coffee would be lovely. And - I'm vegetarian so whatever's possible? But Bond, will it always hurt this much the day after? Please say not?"

Bond stood there in the doorway with a spatula in his hand. Fuck. Two awkward things in one. Vegetarian. Scottish breakfast. A tricky circle to square. Then he remembered that trick with the bananas and the eggs. 

"Do you like banana pancakes? And no. Not always. More lube, more prep, more experience, more relaxation, it shouldn't be more than a dull ache. Unless...unless you want more."

"Mmmm." Q didn't sound sure. "Pancakes sound lovely."

In the end breakfast was really rather delicious. Q ate his blueberry-laden banana pancakes with Greek yoghurt and honey. James ate two Scottish breakfasts and felt like a taut drum. He'd have to hit the gym later. 

Afterwards, Bond loaded the dishwasher and Q went and showered. James could hear him, but only just. Q walked with a natural quietness. It had taken Bond months of training to master the art. 

..............

Eve was delighted to see the two of them arrive together. She made all sorts of terrible faces at them, and when she got no joy she actually came and sniffed Q, who slightly flinched away but managed to stay just about where he was. 

This beautiful man smells of you, 007. Of your flat, of your aftershave, and of you. Please tell me I should be filling out a form. You know we need forms. For security where there are departmental...alliances. Q is technically on the payroll, so...." She stopped, pen poised thoughtfully at her lips. 

"Contractor, Moneypenny. Q is a contractor, currently. Until that changes, he and I are under no formal obligation."

"Unless you marry?" 

James looked weary. 

"Unless...what...unless that, I suppose." 

Throughout this discussion, Q was hanging back, unwilling to be smothered in Chanel again. He wished this could be over quickly, and decided to escape. 

"I just need to check something in the library, Moneypenny. 007, do you not need to speak to Tanner about the Kandahar episode?"

Eve and James looked guilty then. 

..........

Bill Tanner was more circumspect than Eve would ever dream of being, and waited for Bond to raised the subject of Q. He got his reward about ten minutes into the conversation. 

"Bill. Q is, I think, not going back to Oxford. He's too isolated and lonely there. Might there be some sort of pointy head stiff you can set him onto, in Q branch?"

"Lonely in Oxford and - not - lonely in London. Ah, of course. Frankly, we'd be delighted to have him. He's already sec cleared to level 5 Silver, so it would just be a case of a few tweaks. To be honest, he's shown a huge amount of initiative and promise. Just enough independence to make himself an asset, without going all Silva on us, eh??" 

He smiled his closed mouth smile. James wondered if he smiled like that when Mrs Tanner went down on him. He hoped perhaps not, on balance. 

"Excellent. As I say, I haven't spoken with Q properly yet, so..."

"Understood."

..............

When he finished in the library, Q went to seek out James, but couldn't find him. So he knocked on Bill's door. 

"Come in, come in." Bill seemed slightly amused to see him, though Q had no idea why that should be.

"I was looking for 007. But he's not here. I won't bother you."

"He's just down with the medics for a quick check on that dodgy arm. He won't be long. Sit down, have a cup of tea. I have biscuits too, somewhere." Sure enough, out came a slightly battered tin. 

After they had drained their cups in slightly awkward silence, Q pushed his away from him.

"Bill. Could I ask you something, in confidence?"

"Of course. Spit it out?" 

"It's just...I haven't told Ja...I mean, 007 ... Yet, but. I - I'm not going back to Oxford. I want to stay in London. With James. You know we're...well, you know...?"

Bill knew only too well. He didn't need to be an intelligence agent of vast experience to notice the slight care with which Q accepted his invitation to sit. And he saw that the boy was different, not changed exactly, but more sparkling. There was a light in his eyes. Hard to believe that Bond was indulging in something more than a one night stand, and with a bloke too, but this lad was strange and quite beguiling, he supposed. If you went in for that sort of thing, which he didn't.

"Indeed."

"I was wondering if I might be able to work here. Properly. There's a lot of things that happen in Q branch and they're...well. They're frankly a bit shocking if this is supposed to be a modern service. Systems knitted on top of systems, all more and table and hard to support technically.

"The only thing is, James doesn't know yet, we haven't talked about it. I don't want to leave Oxford and come here and just be his houseboy. That way I'd feel not much different in some ways from the escorts. I need my own identity, I don't really know who I am yet, but I know I'm good at all - that". (Q now waving at the racks of servers lining one wall through a glass quad layered partition).

"We would very much like to have you, Q. M and I had already discussed the possibilities of your future, albeit we envisaged it being some months or years further on. I'm sure M will be pleased to have your services earlier than expected. You can work on the basis that you will have your own career. Of course there will be issues with that. You may well have to handle 007 on active missions on occasion. You may hear him being hurt. You may hear or see him being killed. Him dying in front of you and you not being able to do anything to prevent him, maybe even having sent him into the jaws of a trap, of mortal danger. We will need to be sure that you can tolerate that, and cope."

"I...I think I can.."

"Listen, Q. We definitely want you in Q branch. After all, it's named the same as you, it must be a sign. But to progress to its senior ranks, we need real psychological toughness. Your background is one where we might see some positives, you've come through a lot, but also some concerns. That episode of ending up in the escort parlour for example." 

Q made as if to interrupt but Bill raised his hand in defence. 

"Don't shoot the messenger. It's a fact. Deal with it. You ran away from a situation. We expect our agents, in the field or not, to stand and fight. Convince us you'll do that for us, and you'll thrive." 

He smiled now , and got up to come around the desk to shake Q's hand. 

"Welcome to MI6, Q."


	22. London Calling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q comes clean with Bond about his plans. There is an evening in. And Bond is planning a surprise for Q. Sex is still very good, though honesty makes both men better informed about how it affects the other.

By the time they left MI6 that same afternoon, Q had a shiny new pass, which enabled him to access virtually all areas, and had been booked in for several induction sessions, subject to the additional security checks which would now be made. 

Generally, as well as paper and online research, this involved legwork, suited young men and women having short chats with friends and acquaintances of the agent in question. Of course the limitation was that the friends and acquaintances needed to be trustworthy enough themselves to be given the knowledge that their pal was being scoped out by HM Government for security work, and not the kind standing outside nightclubs checking dress codes of the punters.

Q didn't have many friends, and those people he'd grown up with were in the main not considered good disclosure risks. So to some extent, he was without a solid backup file, but this was mitigated by huge advantages. No parents or siblings, save the adopted half sibling who was unaware of his existence. No close friends to get loose tongued down the pub. And an in-house 00 agent in the shape of James Bond. All in all, Q's enhanced security screening was completed quickly. Weapons training would follow.

...........

At this point, Bond was unaware of the developments. Q was hoping they'd be welcome news. He suggested dinner. They headed for home, ordering an Indian takeaway to be delivered. 

Once through the door, the food arrived quickly, leaving little time for talking. They ate, slumped on the floor, James propped up on his cast, Q flat on his front peering into the foil containers with suspicion. 

"It's okay. The veggie sludge and horrors are your side. Manly meatiness over here." 

"Mmmm." Q's mouth was full of bhaji and naan bread. Once able to speak again, he raised his eyebrows at Bond. "Do you have a problem with me being a vegetarian?" 

"Not at all. You're less likely to swipe my food. Although I do think you should be careful. You're very thin. Maybe you need some..."

"My shape is genetic. It won't alter, whatever I eat." 

Bond hummed something which might have been a dissent or an agreement, but they weren't going to argue tonight. They finished their food and stacked all the empty trays to be recycled or binned. 

"Come here?" Bond beckoned to Q, who came over and climbed into his lap. 

"You were in with Tanner for a while. Was he bugging you about us?"

This was his moment. Q wriggled just a little. 

"No. In fact I think he's rather pleased, though he's wary of me because of my midnight flit. I wanted to see him. I asked him - I asked him if I could come and work there."

"And not go back to Oxford?" Bond played with his silky dark hair.

"And not go back to Oxford. If you want me here. Otherwise, I would still do the same plan but I'd have to find somewhere else to live, which is fine too."

James brought his lips close to Q's ear. 

"Not fine". Before Q could react, he shushed him with a finger to the lips. "Not fine for you to go off and live alone when this is your home. Here, with me."

Q's eyes were shining. 

.............

That night, there seemed to be something unspoken starting to fold them together, an weave of lace-like connections that invisibly bound them. Bond was too concerned about Q's comfort to want to try penetration again. Besides, he wanted to demonstrate to Q that he was capable of more than Q trusted him to be. 

So he laid that slim figure down on the bed and lavished it with the kind of worshipping attention that only twenty years of global seduction could train a man for. His mouth was everywhere, his hands variously holding and soothing, clutching and stroking. 

Time after time, long after Q had become slick with sweat and bitten his lip hard enough to bleed, Bond brought him close, so close to the edge; and then, that final moment, just as Q knew he could take no more, 007 released the pressure of his hand at the base of Q's cock and told him to come for him. 

Q could hear his own voice as he came, groaning and explosive. James himself came soon after, over Q's chest. 

Afterwards, Bond cleaned them both gently. Q lay curled against him, one leg tucked between Bond's. He was quiet again. James turned his head towards him. 

"Penny for them?"

Q scrunched his face.

"Nothing much. Nothing bad. Just - overwhelming, it's - kind of overwhelming, I think. For me. In a good way, it's just after I find hard, a bit."

James had not experienced this kind of thing often with his partners, but he knew not to be offended. 

"Tell me. What do you feel?" 

"It's. I don't know. A kind of passing wave of grief, that's the only way I can describe it. I passes, very quickly, but I just feel very emotional and desperate for comfort. I've no idea why, it's not like I don't enjoy the sex, it's fantastic!"

James gathered the bony frame tighter into his arms. 

"I think it's not unheard of. It can be overwhelming, and the brain can just try to shut down for some people, or your hormones can mess up and make you upset. But you must tell me if I'm not giving you what you need, during or after. Promise me you will?"

"Promise." Q looked happier and smiled now. He burrowed deeper into James' side.

James felt his heart swell with - well - something. He wouldn't like to give it a name. It was unfamiliar and threatened to drown him. 

"Tomorrow, Q. We need to drive up to Evesham."

"Where's that?" 

"Worcestershire. We have an appointment. I can't tell you what for until we get there."

Q was now comfortably enveloped in the warmth of the covers and close to falling asleep. He rubbed his eyes. 

"Okay. As long as it's a good surprise."

"It's a good surprise."

"Mmmm". And Q was gone away into sleep.

James lay for a while, thinking thoughts he'd never thought before. Then, at last, as rain drummed on the window-panes, he too slept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What Q experiences is something a lot of people have on occasion, but for him it's more common than that. It's not sub drop as such, but a low key variant version of it. It doesn't mean that the sex wasn't good, nor that he's not in the role he wants to be in, it's just the way his head handles the emotional impact of sex. He's ok! 
> 
> All will be revealed about Evesham next chapter! 
> 
> Oh yeah, and though it might have been changed since, I have been quizzed by the Men from Secret Places when at uni about a friend who was going to work for a Certain Secret department. I've been a bit vague in the chapter, obvs.


	23. Evesham

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is light and fun, a bit of relief after the gruelling stuff. Fun to write too.

As they drove out of London the next morning, Bond reflected on how out of place Q looked in the countryside. As if a strong wind would blow him over on a hilltop, or a shower of rain leave him bedraggled like a cat that's miscalculated. But today was sunny, and fine, and Bond was listening to Q exclaiming at almost everything en route: pub names, unusual architecture, signs to interesting sounding places of interest. It was like being the coach driver on a school trip (but with no mooning at the back window or unison singing).

Evesham was not, Bond conceded, the closest place for them to do what they were doing. But he'd fancied a change of scene (thank goodness his cast was only down to the wrist and he could still drive) and thought that Q could do with some fresh air.

"How often did you get out of London, then." He had been wondering, because Q's curiosity and exclamations had barely subsided an hour into the journey.

"Am I talking too much? I'm sorry! Umm. No, I didn't. I mean, I haven't. Been away from London. Who would have taken me?"

James sighed.

"Well, I'm taking you now. This week, and next, and every week I'm not on an assignment, as often as you like."

"That would be lovely, thankyou." Q sounded a little wistful, as he was reflecting on life's fortunes, and why nobody said this to him when he was small. But it was only for a moment.

"Look, James. Those cows are massive! "

................

By the time they reached their destination, they had stopped for lunch in Evesham itself, then turned up the narrow drive to the centre. 

As they approached, the noise increased. No good trying to keep this a secret any longer. 

Q's ears pricked up. 

"Noooooo....It isn't. Is it?"

Bond smiled his lazy grin. 

"Open the glove compartment."

Inside were the two cat collars Bond had given Q to signal that he meant this to be different, this relationship.

Q flung his arms around Bond. He had no idea how Bond even knew where the collars were (in a small tin box his mother had stored fancy buttons in), but then, Bond was a spy. 

"Thankyou! Thankyou! Thankyou!"

James got out of the car. 

"No use thanking me, it's the women who run this place you should thank. My mother's schoolfriend FIora is one of them. That's why we are here and not at Battersea or the Mayhew.

Q wasn't really listening now, because there were animals who needed him and he would actually be able to take one of them home - or more than one.

They were met by the self same Fiona that Bond had mentioned. She seemed overwhelmed to see James, it had clearly been decades and she kissed him numerous times, as if by doing so she could recover some of the essence of her long dead friend. Fiona was small, smelled of fresh air and seemed to be mostly sweatshirt (she exhibited a fabulously impressive embonpoint) and cat badges. 

Bond exchanges a few social pleasantries with her, and then looked around to introduce Q properly. However the normally shy man had disappeared completely. 007 quickly checked the car but it was empty. 

"Oh dear!" Fiona murmured. "Did your young man get travel sick? Perhaps he needed the loo?"

Bond's eyes narrowed. 

"No, I think we're alright, Fiona. He has excellent bowels and no travel relation conditions other than hating the idea of leaving the ground. I think he will be easy to track down."

They found Q sitting in a large walk-in cage, covered in cats, or at least, that's how it appeared to James. He looked up, very guiltily.

"Oh, um, I'm so sorry, it's just its so long since James has allowed me to borrow a local cat and have it in the flat for a bit, I just couldn't help it. I heard one of them miaow and it sounded a bit anxious so I wanted to see if there was anything it needed. But it's fine, look."

With that, he opened his jacket and revealed a spectacularly ugly specimen, all bitten ears and bald bits, kneading his leg so enthusiastically its purr sounded like a drill. Bond then saw the line of drool coming from its jaws, the thing had hardly any teeth either. 

James had already reserved the two kittens they were supposed to be taking home. He looked at Fiona. She refused to meet his gaze. Q wasn't looking at either of them, rapt in worship of the ugliest cat Bond had ever seen.

"Well then", James said weakly. "This is going well, isn't it?"

They left the centre several hours later, not with the two kittens ("so easy to rehome the kits, I'll have five families queueing up for each", but with the mangy moth-eaten tabby creature who was now yelling the odds at them both from the cat carrier. Q had dealt with all the paperwork, insisting that the cat be in his named ownership because he didn't want the creature to lose a parent if Bond met with a mishap. 

"Does he have a name?" Bond realised he hadn't asked.

"Stalin", Q replied, withdrawing his finger from the cage carefully, in the hope that Bond wouldn't notice that Stalin had just drawn blood. He wrapped his finger, or what was left of it, in a tissue. "Maybe we could call him Josef?" 

"Stalin, how very appropriate. Maybe we could call the damn thing a one way taxi trip to a nice vet and a pet crematorium?" 

Q pouted. "You'll hurt his feelings. He's only lashing out because he's very sensitive to negative emotional vibrations."

James looked at him. "Bollocks. He's a bully and a fighter. I recognise his type. And there's only room for one alpha male in my flat. He'll have to learn to knuckle down and behave. How old is he, anyway?"

"Fifteen."

"Fifteen? You mean we went all the way to Evesham for you to get this motheaten pyjama case of a moggie and he's going to kick the bucket any day?"

"Don't speak like that in front of Josef! Cats can live much longer than that."

"Oh", said Bond, morosely, "can they? That's good then, isn't it?"

He seemed to take some delight in cornering the Aston sharply into the underground car park, Q thought. Josef Stalin was quite thrown about.

As the car stopped, Q leaned over and kissed James on the lips. 

"You will grow to love each other, and thankyou for letting me have him instead of the kitties. They will find homes easily, but he was waiting for us to come and find him."

Bond frowned. 

"Q, what's that smell?"

"Oh dear, said Q, risking a peek through the ventilation slats of the cat carrier. I think his tummy might be a bit upset. Do you have any towels you don't need?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I was a student at Oxford, OH and I moved in together and because he is a mad romantic animal lover like me, we adopted two kittens from a cat rescue shelter in Evesham...hence it had to be there! This chapter is for those two cats, much loved.


	24. Stalin, Shopping and Sex, in that order!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the title!

Josef the cat made himself noticeably at home as soon as they got him home. By noticeably, is meant that Josef quietly did a deadly smelling and rather liquid poo in James Bond's bath. 

Q tried to clear it up before Bond saw it, but seeing it wasn't the issue. The smell was indescribable and James suspected some kind of terrorist dirty bomb until he saw the malevolent Stalin washing himself happily on a fluffy white towel and Q frantically spraying air freshener. 

Bond sighed. And hoped that Josef might call a truce earlier than his namesake tended to. 

...........

They decided to leave Josef to his own devices in order to go to buy Q some work clothes. Well. James decided that they had to get out of the flat for some air, and Q's protests of needing to stay with Josef were firmly overruled.

They drove into London and Q started to fret as they neared Jermyn Street. 

"Do I really need new clothes? The ones I have are not worn out? Look!" He proffered a sleeve to Bond, who peered disdainfully as they sat at traffic lights.

"You do. Don't worry. I'm not going to dress you up like a tailor's dummy. And the dress code of Q branch is more relaxed than for field agents, we have to be able to pass with the sort of individuals we are dealing with, who have a well-developed eye for a phoney. You just need to look smart, not formal."

He was as good as his word. They passed by Jermyn Street and ended up at a shiny red door with a curly ironwork porch. It looked like a private house. Bond pulled a clanking bell. 

"Michael!"

"James, welcome! And this must be Q? Wow. You are going to be a treat. This is like Christmas, James. Where have you been hiding him? Just look at that profile. Come in, come in!!"

The man turned and led the way, expecting them to follow. Q noticed a limp, but then remembered the last time he was invited into a stranger's premises and asked to undress. He was frozen to the step, white-faced.

Bond winced.

"Shit, I'm sorry. I wanted it to be a nice surprise. I should have told you, about Michael. He's my tailor. Don't worry, he's sec clear, he used to be an agent himself, until he got the shrapnel from a rogue cluster bomb in that leg. He didn't fancy himself as a desk jockey and back then, being a gay agent wasn't great for your career prospects, even if actual dismissal was rare by that point. So, he retrained with Six's help, and now works on most of the agents' more glamorous attire. However, he's also excellent at squirrelling out choice options for more informal clothes, so I asked him to put together some options. And they are only options. You can if you insist, reject the lot and I'll meet you at Marks and Spencer with the dull rags you choose. But I think, I hope, that it won't come to that."

Q hopped over the threshold with Bond's hand still close on his waist. 

................

The clothes were amazing. They all fitted him, save a couple of tucks here and there. 

"How did you know my size?", Q asked James, who was flicking his finger huge cylindrical bolts of fine wool cloth. All he got in return was a very lewd smile. 

They left, far too many hours later with an astonishing range of stuff. There were shirts and knits, some of the latter quite garish. There were trousers, including a pair of dark grey tweed bags that Q seemed especially taken with. There were jackets and coats and even underwear. Q blushed when he saw that last lot. James wondered if he sniggered at 'rude' words. He liked the pink flush on Q's cheeks. The last time he'd seen it, Q was writhing underneath him. So, good associations. He stared at the Sky installation van across the street in order to dampen the stirrings of his cock at that lovely, lovely image of Q undone.

.................

Bond got a regular Six driver to pick up the goods from them as they looped around via Vauxhall Cross. Q thought they were headed home, but instead, James put them both in a cab and they were soon in the centre of the old City of London, north of Fleet Street. Legal bookshops and outfitters jostled with wine bars and chambers. The area was clearly being developed, very expensively, which was sanitising some of the eccentricity away, but something of the character of the area hung on stubbornly, the High Court's wedding cake architecture presiding jointly with the spire of St Bride's church and the post-Fire of London flat-fronted chambers set around their gardens. 

They turned up Fetter Lane, and stopped outside what might have been an office block, all shiny reception and marble and sparkling lifts.

"What's here?", asked Q, wary of any more surprises. Even good ones had the power to put him into rabbit in headlights mode, if only for a few moments before his mindfulness of the reality kicked in and told his adrenalin levels to just put a lid on.

James signalled to the receptionist and she walked around the desk and dropped a set of keys into Q's hand. James nodded at them.

"You are. When you want to be. If you want to be. It's just a studio flat, but comfortable. You can rent it out, but, it's here. If you need space, if we don't work out, if something makes my flat unsafe for you, physically or mentally, this is where you can come. It's very quiet, and very safe, and there are views over gardens at the back."

The idea of this, his own small safe space, was completely beguiling and Q fought back tears of joy. 

"I can't let you rent this for me, James. Really, I know how much 00 agents earn and it's really good but it's not oil oligarch level."

James smiled at him, his gaze unusually tender.

"You're right. I can't rent it for you. That would be silly. I've already bought it for you. And it's only a studio flat, so small it wouldn't be allowed in some capital cities, but maybe that's an advantage for a safe retreat, eh?."

Q worried still about the fact that a flat he might have to run to of his relationship faltered was paid for by the man he would be running from. He determined that his pay from Six would be set aside to repay James for the flat, at zero interest. He didn't ask how long that would take, how much James paid for the place. He thought about it but in the end decided that the figure was likely to be so ridiculous and shocking that it was better not to know.

..........

Back at the flat, Q made tea for them both, and found a 00 agents arms around his waist, and a nuzzling at his neck as he finished pouring in the milk.

"Wear the pants."

"You're making my flow waver." Bond shrugged. "I'll lick it up. If you like?"

Q put the milk carton back in the fridge. 

"Wear what pants?" 

Bond just gave him that look. The look that said, without words "you know which ones, the ones I chose for you, that you weren't sure about, but which we both know will do it for both of us."

Q took off his glasses and rubbed them with a small cloth, a number of which James was starting to find squirrelled around the apartment. This one was pink, and it matched Q's deliciously pink cheeks perfectly. "You mean the last ones, don't you? Do you?"

Bond inclined his head and folded his arms. 

Q took a sip of his too hot tea. Then cleaned his lenses again, this time because the tea had steamed them up and he thought he must look nearly as ridiculous as he was about to look in those bloody knickers.

In truth, he didn't see what Bond saw in him physically, not really.

"I don't really see what you see in me physically."

There. He'd blurted it out? Yes, he definitely had. Bond was smiling broadly. 

"Put on those underpants and, my darling Q, I will show you exactly what I see in you....

............

Bond hadn't smoked after sex in years, but he made an exception today. Q had been such a squirmy ball of enthusiasm with the satin camis pushed aside and three of Bond's fingers up him, that Bond himself found his own pleasure came naturally, and immediately, the moment that the green eyed Sprite uttered a long high-pitched sigh and came all over Bond. Fuck it. It warranted a Marlboro Light. 

...........

The only shadow on the horizon was his return to active duty. He'd never feared death before, and he still didn't fear it for himself, but now there was Q. Q and his terrible cooking. Q and his insistence on catering to Stalin's every whim. Q and his clear urge to keep all of the clothes James had bought him "for best", a throwback to his childhood when anything nice (rare and passed on by well meaning strangers, his mother's clients even) was saved for "best" days that never materialised until it was too late and he outgrew them.

And if he wasn't killed? Then he would have to be prepared to do anything to fulfil his mission, and that included sexual favours. When he joined the service, that seemed like a perk to the young James, and later it became a pleasant by product. Now, he couldn't think of anything he wanted less. All he wanted in his bed were green eyes and dark curls and a body like a silver eel, magical and precious.

...........

He smoked a whole packet of the cigarettes that night, while Q slept. Q was dreaming and James could see the curl of his lip as he smiled in his sleep. 

They hadn't said anything, neither of them. But James knew he was falling in love with this strange young man, and wasn't completely sure that he would be able to avoid either breaking his heart or losing him. He wished he was better at all this. 

Stubbing out the last fag end, he saw that it was not far off dawn, and yawning, he climbed back into bed, finding Q stirring at his disturbance, and humming in a satisfied way as he curled up close to give James his warmth. Neither of them heard the blackbird start the chorus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since Ben has admitted he's a bit limited with his imagination with clothes and seems to like wearing the same fave things, the latest being those baggy dark grey tweed things, I thought I would honour them with a mention.


	25. The cold light of reality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q starts work at MI6. Once recovered, Bond is back on active service.

It was another whole month before Bond was free of his cast, and able to properly train. During that time, Q and Bond grew more acclimatised, Stalin continued his reign of terror and occasional IRA-style dirty protests. Of course there was a lot of sex, in the wider definition, though still neither side ventured to broach the persisting lack of penetrative sex. Sex was involving fingers up and round and into, and cocks were being handled and coaxed and sometimes sucked tentatively, but there had been no repeat of that first night. 

Eventually the day came when, as things tend to, everything all blew up at once. Bond was tasked with his first mission since he and Q had become intimate. Owing to some regrettable attrition in numbers of 00 agents (i.e. That rather daring North Korean raid had gone tits up and MI6 had lost four 00 agents to a firing squad), MI6 were more willing to send Bond straight back into serious fray levels much more quickly than they would have liked.

............

Q, of course, was now working at Vauxhall Cross too. His first morning had been difficult with the stares and the whispers. A combination of being the youngest member of Q branch by a country mile, added to rumours believed by all that he was the boy concubine of the legendary and intimidating James Bond, meant that his ear tips were permanently scarlet with embarrassment. 

............

Not yet certified to handhold anyone on a mission, he was expected to listen in to as many as possible in order to start to gather the listening and action execution skills necessary to be a 00 handler. 

He saw little of James in his first few days at work, but gradually, he noticed that sometimes when he came in each morning (Q cycled, Bond thought the idea absolutely fucking extraordinary and came by motorbike or the Aston), his desk was slightly differently arranged to how he knew the cleaners liked to leave everything. That went on for a few days, and then, one Tuesday morning after a lecture on new ideas in identity verification techniques, Q got back to his desk just before lunch to find a bespoke bento box on his desk, all veggie and clearly not from a chain sushi joint. He looked around, but couldn't see anyone. 

The next day, there was a new collar for Josef Stalin, the tyrant having attempted to extend his rule into the lifts and snagged his old collar in the process. The collar was red, with tiny hammers and sickles on it. Q wondered where Bond had got it. And so it went on. Small gifts, snatched dinners followed by exhausting sex marathons, and all the time that elephant in the room of active service.

......

When the day came, Q was unaware until James turned up at the back of a seminar Q was giving to some bulk cabling tech guys about the protocols of probing into the wiring of the most wired up building in Britain. 

He saw James slip in the door at the back, holding it so that it didn't swing back noisily. In the middle of his presentation, and on a roll in a particularly fascinating section about trunking boxes and alarm systems, Q couldn't break for another twenty minutes, all of which he spent in a state of heightened awareness due to the bright blue eyes watching him from the back row of seats.

They stopped for coffee at last, the minions-in-training gaggled together to go and find the coffee machines or the Costa on the transfer floor, depending on their arabica ambition level.

Q and Bond sat together, alone, as Q fiddled with his laptop, lining up the next part of the seminar. 

Bond was content to watch him. Fascinating, to him, how this shy creature, little more than a boy, seemed to transform when on the firm footing of his areas of expertise? It was like all the nerves and diffidence melted away. Q might have wanted a job in order to feel dignified and valid in their relationship, but it was already clear that MI6 was benefitting just as much if not more than Q was from the deal.

..................

There had been that slight hint of unpleasantness, in the first week, whispers about Q and James, nasty insinuations about their relationship, fuelled by accusations that Q was even younger than he was. However, as it grew, it didn't last. James had Eve to thank for that. She surprised the nasty gossips with a report to M, and subsequent issue of four verbal warnings for failing to adhere to the Service's core standards of mutual respect and tolerance and promotion of a cohesive workplace. One of the culprits had a moan about "political correctness"; she was reminded that the phrase could usually be replaced by "not being an absolute shit to your colleagues". 

..............

Once Q was finished with his prep for the next session, Bond made him sit down. 

"I'm being sent back out on task."

"A mission?" 

A nod.

Q felt his blood run cold and sticky-slow. He tried to sound normal.

"When? Where?"

"Tonight. And I'm not being told exactly where. It's safer that way. But I've been given desert kit."

Q nodded, all his bravery summoned. Face pale, set. Like he used to, when hiding from his father.

"Duration?" 

"Four days. More if needed. Essentially, I have to remove someone. As soon as that's done, I can come home."

"Remove meaning kill. Assassinate." It was more of a statement than a question.

"Remove meaning kill, yes." James' voice was unusually soft, as if by this means he could take the shock out of the words. Make it sound more okay.

Q took Bond's hands in his own smaller ones. His fingers traced Bond's lifeline on his palm.

"It makes me wonder, how someone who is capable of such kindness to me, is also capable of such ruthlessness in violence towards others?"

"Wonder? Or do you mean it bothers you? Disgusts you, perhaps? It would be understandable, if it did, it does most people." 

"It doesn't eat away at me, or disgust me, no. But I don't fully understand it. So that makes me feel as if a part of you isn't intelligible by me, and that fact is what might bother me."

"I won't be an assassin forever."

"I know. And I'm much more concerned about you coming home safely than how the other guy ends up. Stay alive. I'm insisting on that. Not negotiable."

"Not negotiable. Understood."

James kissed him then, deep and slow and dirty, and his hand was only just out of the back of Q's trousers when the door opened and the first of the delegates reentered the room.

..............

Q and Bond said their goodbyes at Vauxhall Cross before Q watched as James got into the lift to the underground car park to be driven to RAF Northolt. They were several other agents with him, all looking grim-faced.

Q didn't feel close to tears now, more a stony resolve, and for the rest of that day he terrified the rest of Q branch with his productivity and the wild fire in his eyes. Even Eve did not venture to approach him, sensing that he was strung taut, liable to snap at the least intervention. Instead, she dealt with every one of the twenty four emails that she received from him during the day and noted that Q's lunch remained uneaten.


	26. Reunion, in more ways than one.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ok basically whump and smut. And a longish chapter, after the last one was so short. What's not to like!

After the North Korean disaster, most in MI6 were working on the basis that provided lessons were learned, a repeat of such abject failure was unlikely, at least in the foreseeable future.

Q maintained an impressively professional air during working hours, hearing Sophie, one of Q branch's best handlers, talking in a low voice to one or other of the agents.

M was relieved to see when he popped down intermittently, to see that Q's relationship with Bond was not impacting on his abilities to do his job. Eve was relieved too. 

.............

Q knew he was fooling them all. He'd learned to be convincing in the facades he built, early on in life. To do so could mean the difference between a half-hearted clip round the ear, and a full on beating. He knew what broken ribs felt like. It was worth working on your art. 

It was only around seven or eight in the evening, that Q branch really emptied, leaving only the active handlers, their relief backups, and a few miscellaneous technicians, monitoring systems and doing a few sandbox tests and minor code releases. 

Q had his own office now, not much more than a cupboard but it was somewhere he could think, and importantly, it had switchable clear/opaque glass, a sofa and his tea making supplies. There was also a small fridge, intended for his sandwiches or other lunchtime supplies.

The fridge was empty. It had been empty since the moment Bond was driven away in the big black car.

It wasn't that Q was unwilling to eat. He just couldn't. He did try, but the resulting vomiting left his throat sore and his eyes watering. Always logical, if not always completely sensible, lacking maturity, Q simply decided that if eating was causing him problems, he'd just not do it until James came back in four days time. He refused to countenance the possibility of the mission going on any longer than that, even if common sense told him it might.

After three nights, he stopped going back to the flat. It was James's and his presence was too vivid there. He asked a neighbour to feed Josef, though he had to pay her well. She had met Josef and therefore took a lot of bribing to go within fifty feet of the creature.

.............

It was two days after Bond should have been back, and the three agents out in...wherever they were in the dry sandy regions of the globe...had gone dark. There had been no comms since a desert sandstorm caused an outage in the comms link the day all this was supposed to have finished. Instead of meeting James at the airport, having dinner, having sex, having each other, Q was sitting at his desk in the late evening, nauseous from hunger and worry, listening to the sound of mission-meltdown; static crackle from all three agent links. 

Eve started to think something was up with Q a couple of days later. He was doing some training with Charlie, a junior recruit. She had brought down some personnel files for training record updates to be copied across, when she glanced across at the training pod. It all seemed fine, she wasn't sure what had alerted her, not really, so she looked back down at her papers. But less than a minute later, she heard a small gasp, and looked back to see Q swaying on his feet, eyes closed tight shut, his unfortunate trainee tentatively reaching an arm out, looking worriedly around him. Charlie wasn't long out of his gap year and whilst he was tremendously good at advanced physics, he didn't seem to have absorbed many of the gap year mantras about how to react in a minor crisis. Instead, he just stood there, hopeless arm reaching out, the other frantically signalling to the world to come and rescue him now please.

Eve was by Q's side in seconds. She pressed the medical alert code on her phone, and despatched the unfortunate physicist off to Costa for some sustaining morsels. 

It was very handy having a medical service in-house. Within a couple of minutes, they were fussing over Q and all Eve had needed to do was to gently slide him down to a sitting position with his head between his knees and talk quietly at him about nothing in particular. 

She took one of the medics aside as they prepared to wheel Q away in a wheelchair.

"Is he ok?'"

"He will be. We've given him glucose and fluids, just to get his levels up. Can you tell me if you know at all, what he's been eating, what his sleep patterns are like? Is there anyone you know we can ask?"

"His partner is on mission currently. I can check the monitoring of his flat and here to see the hours he's doing. We have sensors in the flats but cameras only in the public rooms, except in specific risk scenarios."

"Of course, yes if you could check, that would be great. I get the impression from his condition that he's neither eating or sleeping very much, certainly not enough. I need to confirm that, and also establish whether that's due to a physical cause, or something more psychological. He was very light when he joined the Service, and he's almost a stone lighter now. If we rule out physical ailments, which we will look at, then whatever's troubling this lad needs to be resolved, else I shall have to recommend that his future in the Service is reconsidered."

Eve frowned. Q had only just joined, and was so happy in his work. More even than his relationship with 007, his job was giving him the self respect that he'd never had. To tell him that he was being sacked....no. That couldn't be allowed to happen.

"I'm sure it won't come to that. I will ensure that he is better monitored and supported from here on in. Let me get you the log records."

...........

It was four more days before Bond was able to get a text message out to Vauxhall Cross, indicating that he and his fellow agents were still alive. Extraction followed. Bond was puzzled by the lack of any contact or message from Q, but since it was his first mission since they had got together, he concluded that Q might not want to draw too much attention or look unprofessional. 

When his place landed back at Northolt, northwest of central London, he and his fellow agents went their separate ways, to shower and change and get some kip. Normally, initial debriefings were immediate on landing, but since this was an assassination mission for two of ISIL/Daesh's highest commanders, and what remained of those targets was still being hosed out of a shack near Raqqa, there was little need to restate the obvious. It could wait until morning, this time.

James was just on the point of calling Q, who wasn't responding to his texts, when Moneypenny turned up, alone. 

"Eve. Where is he?" Bond was tired and in full post mission drop now, his words slightly slurred by fatigue, not drink.

"He's fine, James. He's ok. Just not so great at looking after himself, it seems, when he's worrying about what you are doing. But don't make a big thing, he's really embarrassed - actually, he's more ashamed - and he doesn't want you to think he'll fall apart every time you have to go abroad."

James's nostrils flared with impatience. 

"Where is he?"

"He's at your flat, though he stayed with me the last couple of nights. He had a slight funny turn, so one night in medical while they checked for anything underlying, but everything was fine apart from the malnutrition and lack of sleep."

For one split second, Bond panicked internally. Had he taken on someone too fragile to cope with his life, or even maybe their own life? The past casts long shadows, after all.

Eve could read his thoughts. She shook her head at him. 

"Noooo no no no. He's fine. He really is. He's learning, facing a new job, a new life, and doesn't have the skills to deal with it. If he'd been average weight, he probably wouldn't have keeled over so readily, so he's unlucky really, he needs to learn that the margin of wellbeing for him is much smaller than for most of us. And I think maybe he will cope better if he's more rather than less involved in handling your missions, despite the risk of witnessing something awful. I get the impression from our late night conversations over hot chocolate drinks that his fears are magnified by not knowing; to him, real adversity is much less frightening, because it can be seen and assessed. So I'm going to talk to M."

"Anyway, here we are."

.........

If it wasn't for the alarms being set to occupied mode, Bond wouldn't have known that Q was even in the flat. Eve let him go ahead, and went to the kitchen to busy herself with making tea.

He found Q in the bedroom, a small shape huddled, with his arms around his knees. James might have spent the best part of the last fortnight holed up in a bombed out apartment block in Raqqa, but he was in better shape than his partner. 

His instinct was to be angry. All Q had to do was to eat, sleep and go to work in an office, while he was facing murderous fanatics. 

But Bond was older and wiser than he had once been, and he realised that it was the fact of him going through those risks and travails which triggered Q's crisis. 

And something in his mind, a notion, crystallised, as the pale tear-stained face peered up at him from behind bony knees.

.......

It was very quiet in the flat. Eve finished making the tea, Earl Grey for Q, James would have to have the same despite his view that it tasted of floral disinfectant. She noticed how the kitchen had changed since Q had moved in. Previously, it had been like a glossy ad, all chrome and gloss and expensive fittings. Now, the furniture was unchanged but the place felt very different. There were magnets on the fridge with takeaway menus, and information cards about the cat's vet. There were a couple of slightly wacky Starck kitchen gadgets in bright colours. She opened the fridge. Once tending to contain only champagne, claret and various pots of Fortnum's cheeses, with Bath Oliver biscuits to accompany them, the unit was now respectably full with all manner of weird and wonderful ingredients, all veggie and clearly Q's tastes, although she did note the post-it stuck to the door that said "Q - experimentation only when J home". It was signed by them both. Moneypenny had heard about the fire brigade callouts. She smiled. 

Eventually she had to go and look for the pair as the tea was getting stewed. She found them just inside James' bedroom doorway, locked in an embrace which was so passionate and yet so gentle, that she couldn't look away for a while, but instead just watched, teapot in hand. 

At length, she caught James' eye, and he nodded and signalled to indicate that they would be out in a moment. The spell was broken, and she walked back to the kitchen, feeling slightly sombre. She was happy for them. She just wished she could have what they had. 

............

When the pair reappeared, Q had wiped away the tears and scrubbed his face, making it red. Eve saw that James also had a slight redness around his eyes. She decided not to mention it. Instead, she concentrated on producing an apple cake, which she thought would be nice and digestible for Q. She was pleased to see him slowly work his way through a whole slice, even if the slice was slimmer than she had wanted. 

She left, soon after, confident that what Q needed was 007's presence, and that things should rapidly improve. Besides that, they needed time alone together. Oh, to be that in love...

............

Back in the flat, Q was all fingers and thumbs, trying to clear up the tea things. He was really just waiting for the Talk. For them to sit down, like grown men, and discuss why it was that Q had not even got through one single mission without losing the thread of daily routines like eating and sleeping. Why Bond only had Q's best interests at heart. Why he didn't want Q to risk his health by being with him. Why it was better if they gave each other a bit of space, just for a bit. 

The spoons made it safely back into their slot in the cutlery drawer. The central heating hummed quietly. Stalin the cat did something noxious in his bathroom litter tray and Q could hear his obsessive scraping, hear the litter being scattered to the four points of the compass. He was relieved there were two bathrooms, but it still meant clearing up. Maybe he could get a litter tray with a roof, they did them, he thought. Would Stalin use it? 

A glass appeared next to him. A hand on his hip. Lips nuzzled at his nape.

"James. I'm sorry. I just felt sick with worry and then I felt sick because I hadn't eaten, and it all just spiralled..."

"Shhhh. It's OK, Q. I'm sorry I couldn't check in sooner than I did. Shush now. We're here, and we're alive."

He took the tea towel gently out of Q's hand, and led him out of the kitchen, deftly flicking off the light.

.........

It was dark in James' bedroom. Q stood quietly as James stripped himself, and then stripped Q. There was something in the air, not quite reverent, but solemn. Words seemed superfluous. 

What had seemed too intimidating to revisit since their first night together now seemed the most natural thing in the world. Q felt the need for a deep and profound connection, and to try again seemed right. 

James didn't say very much, also feeling the atmosphere it seemed, though he did ask Q if he was sure when Q made his intentions obvious. Q smiled and nodded. "Yes. Very sure."

James smiled at him, eyes sparkling despite his fatigue. This would definitely be a single round event tonight, Q weak and 007 exhausted, but they could make it a good one.

Bond's finger teased for a while before it slid into Q, all the while Bond's other hand was stroking Q's cock and they were kissing passionately, wet and warm and teeth clashing and Q felt the finger but was distracted enough to happily continue. A second and third followed. Bond continued even when Q was cursing him to exchange them for James' prick. He needed to know that Q was as open as he could be. Not having followed up on the first anal intercourse was not a help in relaxing the muscles, in training them. Q needed to be thoroughly prepared. 

So by the time James finally relented and Q swallowed hard as Bond's penis pushed and pressed its way into him, Q was open and sloppy with all the lube James had slicked him with. It felt different, this time. A low dull ache, rather than pain, and the feeling changed to breathlessness sooner too. Q was on his back, and he could see James' face this way, but he really wanted to be completely covered by Bond. He felt slightly detached this way. He wanted Bond's weight on him, with his own wrists pinned and captive. For 007 to own him. 

He signalled to James to pull out for a minute and quickly quelled the flash of worry on Bond's face by theatrically rolling over onto his front. He raised his hips just a little, to enable James to re-enter him, but then allowed himself to drop, so that the thrusts were shallow and sharp, and he reached back to pull the too courteous 007 right down onto him, taking his hands and showing James he wanted this, to be covered and constrained. 

James groaned in arousal, and wrestling Q's wrists to the bed, he held them there so tight it hurt. He kicked Q's skinny legs apart, and drawing back, almost slipping out, he slammed back in. Even through all this, their flesh to flesh contact was total. Q was a pinned butterfly in a frame, a dazzling fragile creature held in place by a power so great, so overwhelming, that immediate and complete capitulation was inevitable. 

.............

In some ways, the sex was more violent than before. James left bites, scratches. Q was still, almost passive. Bond checked if he was ok, and Q smiled at him beatifically. That established, James had to conclude that Q like this was something that aroused him especially highly. By the end, he had moved back onto his haunches, lifting Q folded at the waist, and roaring hoarsely as he fucked him again and again. When Q tipped his head back for Bond to bite at his neck, James came, ejaculating in long creamy pulses and Q, now able to get hold of himself, came shortly afterwards, with a high, strained cry of climax. 

Bond gradually felt the pulses slow. His penis sensitised and softening, he slipped free, and slowly lowered Q down to the bed. Slipping away to get a cloth, he cleaned them quickly and gently. Then, he gathered Q up into a comma shaped bundle, and slipped into bed behind him, curling around his body like swaddling.

Before his head hit the pillow, he joined Q in sleep.


	27. Turning tables

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back from my trip to London where I saw the archive film of Ben Whishaw in Bakkhai, which was incredible. When he says he as the god Dionysus demands "total submission" and smirks, sashaying away, it's just - everything! 
> 
> But I managed a bit of writing, so there's a new chapter! 
> 
> We're nearly at the end of this fic, one more chapter to go! hope you like this one. A bit of smut and some BAMF Bond. Hurrah!

In the morning, James lay awake at first light. He didn't want to wake the bony spider sprawled across the bed, so he just stayed silent and still, watching and thinking. The covers had slipped down. He was fascinated by Q's hair, that immensely abundant mop of wavy satin, the heavy dark stubble shadow and intrigued by the contrast of his modest hair growth elsewhere. A thin, delicate trail of dark hair from his navel down to where it joined his pubic hair. Fairly sparse hair in his armpits. The hair on his legs, softer, dark but not thick. 

Q was a man of contrasts, he concluded. He was several things, several seemingly contradictory things, wrapped up in a single package. His hair was a reflection of that truth. Bond found it fascinating. Some other people he'd met had hidden depths, but there had never been anyone with hidden dimensions before. He couldn't imagine ever tiring of trying to understand this boy. 

He was waiting for Q to wake, now. Waiting to see if there was any suggestion of pain or discomfort, which might cause Q to look anxious again. It had gone better, this time, and Bond hoped that repetition and care might prevent any issues, but he couldn't have been more diligent than last night, so it had to have been okay, or it would be a losing battle. Neither of them would leave the other for it, but each would not see the other in the same way. Plenty of gay couples never had anal sex, but for those for whom it was a feature, it was important. James knew Q thought so, and he did, also.

..........

 

He was waking now, Q, a slim hand unfurling and stretching just like a cat. A yawn, and more languorous extensions. Now, his eyes opened slowly, green chips of emerald draped by long dark curling lashes. And he smiled. No hint of discomfort, or regret, just the brilliant smile of this brilliant youth. 

Bond smiled back. His smile was one of intense relief. Thank God. He felt like a king.

"Breakfast? There's some sort of rabbit food and some bread that looks like a loofah. However, since you bought it, I'm assuming that you believe it edible. So."

Q grinned, cupping his face on one propped forearm. 

"Yes please, I can't think of anything better than my lovely tasty weird bread toasted, thank you."

They ate in spring sunshine at the island in the kitchen. The papers had come, and Bond was glancing at each section in a half-interested way. Q was spreading his loofah bread which seemed to be very unnecessarily seedy with some kind of spread that hadn't involved any cows. Bond picked up the tub and sniffed it. It brought back a sweet memory of his mother's crinkled kind but revolted face when she opened the wine his father had made out of a glut of neeps at Skyfall, the year before they both died.

He glanced up to find Q watching him. Saying nothing, Q held out his hand for his tub of spread. James handed it over with a smile. 

...........

After breakfast there was a shower, which turned into more tremendous sex. Bond was glad of the limitless hot water and pinging spray of the jets, which enhanced the pleasure of coming hard and fast down Q's throat, hands clutching Q's hair, eyes fixed on each other. Then, James returned the favour, never ceasing to adore the frantic abandoned nature of Q in the throes of ecstasy. Actual whimpering, it seemed, was very erotic. Who knew? He looked up at the sensory wreckage of his lover, and he openly adored him.

They slumped in the shower until the water ran cool and their limbs cramped.

Once cleaned up, the two men dressed, feeling tired and languorous. Q wore a dark green soft wool cashmere jumper, and Bond some kind expensive polo knit. Both were in jeans. If not for the lines of Bond's muscles under the sweater, they could have been any modern gay couple. Those lines were not from a gym, though, an informed observer could tell, if they paid attention. They were from extreme physical challenge and a commitment to do whatever it took to get the mission done.

..........

They were happy. Yet still, a cloud rolled in and loomed large.

..........

Their world seemed to operate now in a weighted balance. As their physical relationship burst into flower, so the challenges of operating in a world - their world - where lethal danger lurked as a matter almost of routine - grew and ink-darkened the skies, even on the sunniest of days. 

It didn't matter how straightforward the mission, or the level of skill or extent of the supervision of Q's wellbeing. He did better than before, because he was becoming a professional at his job, and did not allow things to get as bad as that first time. But he was clearly under strain, talking Bond through the latter stages of operations where support melted away at just the wrong moment, or there were undetected secondary devices, or munitions misfired. He was better on the surface when he was talking Bond through these foul-ups, but James saw he was getting tireder and losing some of his sparkling zest for life. Q was trying to hide it, alright, but James saw his face when Q thought he couldn't see, in mirrors, reflected in the glass, through a small chunk of a door left slightly ajar. 

Bond wasn't the only one who saw. Back from his latest mission, he was called in by Eve. He didn't know what she wanted to discuss, until he sat down and stretched out his legs and stole her coffee, draining the cup. Across the table, was Qs file. 

"This isn't appropriate, Eve. If you have an issue with Q, then you should be discussing it with him, don't you think?"

"And I will. We will. M, I mean. But I wanted to have a quiet chat first. You know that M will tell Q that the strain on him risks your own operational capability. That due to this, and despite the huge talents he brings, M will ask Q to leave the service?"

James had known, or should have done, but despite that, her words cut through him like ice. 

"Unacceptable. Q is made whole by his work. And he's brilliant at it. MI6 can't just toss that aside?"

"Agreed. Normally they wouldn't. But if it's a choice between their most experienced and effective 00 agent in the history of the Service, and a relatively new even if outstandingly talented Q branch officer...well, just be pragmatic, James darling, the choice is clear."

She smiled sympathetically. 

Bond snarled. 

"Where is M?"

Eve sighed.

"He said you'd say that. He says he's happy to see you...." She was interrupted.

"That's useful."

James strode past her, and walked into Ms office, without an appointment, and without knocking.

............

Gareth Mallory was at the window, on a telephone call, hand rubbing the back of his neck. He could clearly see 007's reflection, and did not turn. His call sounded important, and he continued with it for approximately three point eight seven seconds. That was the moment that Bond set off the fire alarms. 

.............

Ninety minutes later, the all clear was given. James Bond was back in M's office, and this time he had the M16 head's full attention. 

"That was a bloody stupid stunt, Bond. It could have endangered more than one agent, had we been tracking them at that moment. What are you playing at? 

James, still standing, refusing the offer of a chair, picked up the stapler on the desk and pulled back its spring loader, emptying staples all over the antique mahogany writing surface. 

"I could ask you the same question M."

"Is this about Q? Because if it is..."

James slammed his fist down on the desk and spat out his words.

"This is about Q, and about me, and about this Service treating both of us like children, no, worse, like chattels."

"007, I can assure you..."

"It is not for you to assure me, instruct me or advise me, Mallory! It is not for MI6 to decide that Q is dispensable whilst I am not. Listen to me clearly. You do not make those decisions, decisions to choose between us. Not now, not ever. We make those choices. I make those choices. 

"Your actions have helped me to make that choice. Q stays. He is the future here. I'm out. Only one of us can stay, well, that's absolutely fine. You've had the best years of my life, and now I'm taking what's left of it back. You're lucky to have him. Don't piss him off. I might be retiring but I won't lose my ordnance skills that quickly."

There was silence for a few moments, as the words hung in the air, almost tangible.

M went pale. He pressed the intercom.

"Moneypenny. Do you think you could step inside for a moment?"


	28. Completion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Someone has to tell Q
> 
> NB If this last chapter is too sentimental, blame the fact I've been watching Ben in Lilting for about the fifth time tonight.....

It didn't take long for the news of 007's dramatic resignation to spread around the huge ziggurat. It was all anyone was talking about. There was a tradition, after all, in MI6, that agents did not resign, that the Service was in control. Either they died (most), were retired through age or injury, or, in the case of those whose loyalties had become suspect, they simply vanished, erased from the record.

James Bond was the longest serving field agent that SIS had ever had. It was a mark of his singularity that his attempt at resignation did not meet with derision. Instead, M sat across the desk from him, looking grave and, it might even be said, slightly sad. 

.........

"Does Q know about your plans? About you coming here today?" 

"No. He knows nothing of any of this. He has no idea he was to be labelled unstable and hounded out. He's out at Porton Down today, looking at biological agents. I will need to tell him, before he gets the news from someone else."

M nodded.

"You know, I could invoke various emergency security Statutory Instruments to compel you to stay. If it were deemed necessary."

Bond nodded.

"Of course you could. You could also have me shot and dissolved in the acid tank on Basement 3 level. But instead, I'm going to make you an offer; not as good as me staying in the field, but the best I can do."

He spent some time in animated discussion with the weary M. At last, though, the two men shook hands. 

"There'll be a presentation evening, of course, all the usual."

"Not for me, thanks", James threw back cheerily. "I'd rather slit my wrists. Pop the gold watch in the post, there's a duck. And I'm sure you won't mind if Q finishes on time for once this evening. There's a lot I need to discuss with him."

"Of course. As you wish."

Bond hooked his jacket over his shoulder, started whistling "The Skye Boat Song", and grinned at Eve as he swept past her desk. 

.........

He found Q in his lair, back from Porton Down and not obviously stricken by super-disease bacteria. Looked like all the test tubes had stayed intact then. Q looked up from some mysterious soldering, and gestured that he'd be out in a minute. Bond picked up a few odd papers littering Q's desk, snorting with amusement at the array of empty yoghurt pots and protein shakes that punctuated the paper mountain. The bin was overflowing with more. Eve had been very diligent in her supervision of Q's health whilst at work, it was clear.

At last, Q turned off the soldering iron and emerged from the goldfish bowl shaped pod he called a second home.

He smiled broadly on seeing Bond, but then he noted the serious look on James' face, and the smile faded. 

"Can we talk in here, Q?" James indicated back into the pod.

"Uh..umm...yes, of course. Is everything okay? You're not due down here and it's kind of early..."

Bond led them in and closed the door. Soundproofed. No one else would hear. And there was nothing electronic in here, save for that soldering iron. 

They sat there, in the glass walled workshop, and James told Q that he was resigning, retiring, kind of. That he would be the one making dinner ("lower risk of food poisoning, anyway"), sorting out the washing and feeding Stalin the cat. That now was the right time.

Q was struck dumb by the news. He frowned slightly, and rubbed his chin, then leaned forward and looked hard at Bond's eyes, no doubt checking for drugs or the smell of alcohol. He seemed satisfied to rule that out, however, and settled back, looking if anything more mystified than ever.

"Why? Why now, James? Why so suddenly?"

James didn't want to tell Q, but he knew he would learn from others if he didn't.

"MI6 don't think we can both operate. They think you aren't psychologically tough enough to deal with my continuing in missions, and that if anything happens to you as a result, I will put others lives at risk in order to address that."

Q nodded slowly, in acknowledgement rather than understanding or agreement. He'd wondered if the Service would support his remaining, if he was honest. But Bond?

"Why are you going, James? Why is it not me being asked to resign. I'm the weak link here, clearly? You were fine without me, and now you're not fine, apparently. So why am I not the one being pushed?"

Bond walked over to him and clasped his arms tightly around Q's waist. He dipped his head to nuzzle against Q's forehead, the low brow of hair tickling his eyelids. Q smelled sweet and grass-fresh, though he'd been here or at Porton Down for hours. 

"Because as I told M, I'm reaching the end of my useful life as an agent, and I'd rather not wait until I'm just that bit too slow in dodging bullets, or hurling myself away from an exploding fuel tank. But more, because I don't ever again want to see the look of torment on your face when I am missing for a while on mission."

"So I am weak. I make you weak."

"No. The opposite, Q. You make me strong, fucking strong. Strong enough to do what I should have done five years ago, walk away alive. I didn't do it, because this was my life. I had nothing to to walk away to, to make any sacrifice irrelevant in comparison. 

Now - I do. I'm strong enough and happy enough to be able to walk away. And to enable you to continue, building your career, well fed and well fucked and knowing I have your back. Sound good?"

Q looked away, and Bond worried he would eventually look back and still be insulted or ashamed at not coping with James being in danger. When he did turn back, his eyes were bright with unshed tears. 

"Would you really do that - quit?" The idea of a life without being permanently on the edge of terror was sinking in.

"I've already done it. I'm here to hand in my weapons to Q branch."

Q was open-mouthed as Bond removed the Walther from its holster and placed it on the table. Then, James almost reverently took off his shoulder holster, and placed that next to the revolver. Various other gadgets followed, until James stood in front of him, unarmed, symbolically stripped of all the embellishments and tools of his trade.

"Let's get out of here, Q. I feel in need of a drink."

...........

That night, they didn't go back to the flat, but instead booked themselves into a hotel overlooking Hyde Park. It was a penthouse suite, and there was a bath overlooking the view, one way glass providing privacy whilst allowing them to feel like the whole world could see them. They ate lobster and steak and tarte tatin, and a good deal of fine claret, and then luxuriated together in the enormous bathtub, taking it in turns to slick silky soap over the other's skin. Bond all scars and sinews, muscle and menace, though this would soften in the coming months, like a stallion let down in the paddocks after being retired from racing. And Q, pale skinned and silky dark of hair, green eyes flicking from Bond's face to his hands, watching intently as James touched his neck, his waist, his thigh. Wondering if it could ever be this good again, as good as tonight?

Afterwards, after James had fucked him and they lay spent and smug as well fed cats, and James had curled around his back and spooned him while they came down from the high, Q decided that he didn't care if it was never as good again, even half as good would do. 

So he slept, warm and safe, while James dreamed of the strange green-eyed boy who lay so quiet and still in his embrace. 

Tomorrow, they would go to the park. And James would ask Q for more, for everything, to tie himself to an ageing worn out agent who loved him to distraction. He had no idea what Q would say, but he was going to do it. 

James smiled in his sleep. The air conditioning hummed quietly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ILY all for reading this wee story, I've never written 00Q before and it's been really cool to get such great feedback and so much love! Thankyou!!


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